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THE MIDDLE AGES 



SKETCHES AND FRAGMENTS 



BY 



THOMAS J. SHAHAN, S.T.D., J.U.L. 

PROFESSOR OF CHURCH HISTORY IN THE CATHOLIC 

UNIVERSITY, WASHINGTON, D.C. ; AUTHOR OF 

*' THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIANITY," ETC. 



NEW YORK, CINCINNATI, CHICAGO 
BENZIGER BROTHERS 

PBINTEES TO THE HOLT APOSTOLIC SEB 

1904 



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NOV 14 I&U4 

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CLASS /^^ XXc. No; 

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REMIGIUS LAFORT, 

Censor Librorum. 



«if JOHN M. FARLEY, 
Archbishop of New York. 



CoTTBi&wr, 1904, »T BuKziSBB Beothbbb. 



E0 ms I9ear iWentJ 
EDWARD JOSEPH McGOLRICK 

THESE PAGES 
ARE AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED 



FOREWORD. 

The historical sketches and fragments that are 
here submitted to the general reader deal only with 
a few phases of the rich and varied life of the period 
known usually as the Middle Ages. The writer 
will be amply rewarded if they serve to arouse a 
wider interest in that thousand years of Christian 
history that opens with Clovis and closes with the 
discovery of the New World. Both in Church and 
State the life of to-day is rooted in those ten mar- 
vellous centuries of transition, during which the 
Catholic Church was mother and nurse to the infant 
nations of the West, a prop and consolation to the 
Christians of the Orient. Our modern institutions 
and habits of thought, our ideals and the great lines 
of our history, are not intelligible apart from a suffi- 
cient understanding of what men thought, hoped, 
attempted, suffered and founded in the days when 
there was but one Christian faith from Otranto to 
Drontheim. The problems that now agitate us and 
seem to threaten our inherited social order were 
problems for the medisBval man. The conflicts and 
difficulties that make up the sum of political history 
for the last four centuries are only the last chapters 
in a story of surpassing interest that opens with the 
formal establishment of Christian thought as the 
basis and norm of social existence and development. 
If anything seems distinctive of the modern mind 

5 



6 FOBEWOBB, 

as against the mediaeval temperament, it is the sense 
of law, an even, constant, inerrant working of forces 
and principles that brook no interference from with- 
out and are supremely equitable in their operations. 
If we compare mediaeval with modern history, we 
shall learn with certainty that in both there is domi- 
nant this reign of law, a consistent inexorable unity 
of purpose, a progressive social formation. In both 
there are divine and human elements that occupy, 
in varying prominence, the foreground of the great 
world-stage, tending always to create a higher type 
of mankind, to nurse the dormant idealism of the 
race, and. to lift it gradually toward the goal of all 
human endeavor — the flawless life of the spirit 
chastened and transformed and deified by the imi- 
tation of the God-man. 

The essays and papers included in this volume 
have appeared elsewhere at intervals. For the cour- 
teous permission to reprint them I desire to express 
my thanks to the Catholic Worlds the American 
Catholic Quarterly Review^ the Catholic Times^ the 
Ave Maria and the Catholic University Bulletin* 



CONTENTS. 



Gregory the Great and the Barbarian World . 9 

Justinian the Great (a.d. 527-565) .... 35 

The Religion of Islam .113 

Catholicism in the Middle Ages .... 134 

The Christians of Saint Thomas .... 221 

The Medieval Teacher 230 

The Book of a Mediaeval Mother .... 240 

German Schools in Sixteenth Century . . . 255 

Baths and Bathing in the Middle Ages . . . 286 

Clergy and People in Medieval England . . 297 

The Cathedral-builders of Medieval Europe . 311 

The Results of the Crusades ..... 355 

On the Italian Renaissance , . . * . 394 



THE MIDDLE AGES. 



GREGORY THE GREAT AND THE 
BARBARIAN WORLD. 

The latter part of the sixth century of our 
era offers to the student of human institutions 
a fascinating and momentous spectacle — the 
simultaneous transition over a great extent of 
space from an ancient and refined civilization 
to a new and uncouth barbarism of manners, 
speech, civil poHty, and culture. It was then 
that the great mass of the Roman Empire, 
which generations of soldiers, statesmen, and 
administrators had consolidated at such fright- 
ful expense of human blood and rights, was 
irrevocably broken by the savage hordes whom it 
had in turn attempted to resist or to assimilate. 

One moment it seemed as if the fortune of a 
Justinian and the genius of a Belisarius were 
about to regain all Italy, the sacred nucleus of 
conquest, and to proceed thence to a reconsti- 

9 



10 GBEGOBY THE GBEAT, 

tution of the Roman State in Western Europe. 
But it was only for a moment. Fresh multi- 
tudes of Teutonic tribesmen swarmed from out 
their deep forests along the Danube or the Elbe, 
and overflowed Northern Italy so effectually as 
to efface the classic landmarks, and to fasten 
forever on the fairest plains of Europe their 
own barbarian cognomen. It is true that the 
bureaucracy of Constantinople, aided by the local 
pride of the cities of Southern Italy, by a highly 
centralized military government, by the prestige 
and the influence of the Catholic bishops, as well 
as by the jealousy and disunion of the Lombard 
chiefs, maintained for two centuries the asser- 
tion of imperial rights, and a steadily diminish- 
ing authority in the peninsula and the islands 
of the Mediterranean and the Adriatic. But, by 
the end of the sixth century, all serious hope 
of reorganizing the Western Empire was gone. 
Thenceforth (thanks to the Lombard) the Frank 
and the Visigoth, luckier than their congeners 
the Ostrogoth and the Vandal, might hope to 
live in peaceful enjoyment of the vast provinces 
of Spain and Gaul, and the fierce pirates of old 
Saxony could slowly lay the foundations of a 
new empire on the soil of abandoned and help- 
less Britain. In the West not only was the 



GBEGOBY THE GRJ^AT. 11 

civil authority of Rome overtlirown, but there 
went with it the venerable framework of its an- 
cient administration, the Latin language — that 
masterful, majestic symbol of Roman right and 
strength — the Roman law, the municipal system, 
the great network of roads and of intercom- 
mercial relations, the peaceful cultivation of the 
soil, the schools, the literature, and, above all, 
that splendid unity and consolidarity of interests 
and ideals which were the true cement of the 
ancient Roman State, and which welded together 
its multitudinous parts more firmly than any 
bonds of race or blood or language. 

Notwithstanding the transient splendor, the 
victories and conquests, of the reign of- Justinian, 
the condition of the Orient was little, if any, 
better than that of the West. The Persian and 
the Avar harassed the frontiers, and occasionally 
bathed their horses in the sacred waters of the 
Bosphorus. The populations groaned beneath 
the excessive taxes required for endless fortifica- 
tions, ever recurring tributes, the pompous 
splendor of a great court, and the exigencies of 
a minute and numerous bureaucracy. Egjrpt 
and Syria, no longer dazzled by the prestige or 
protected by the strong arm of Rome, began to 
indulge in velleities of national pride and spirit, 



12 GBEGOBY THE GREAT. 

and, under the cover of heresy, to widen the 
political and social chasm that yawned between 
them and the great heart of the empire. The 
imperial consciousness, as powerful and energetic 
in the last of the Palseologi as in a Trajan or a 
Constantine, was still vigorous enough, but it 
had no longer its ancient instruments of good 
fortune, wealth, prestige, and arms. The 
shrunken legions, the diminished territories, the 
dwindling commerce, foreshadowed the dissolu- 
tion of the greatest political framework of 
antiquity; and in the quick succeeding plagues, 
famines, and earthquakes, men saw the ominous 
harbingers of destruction. TJie time of which I 
speak was, indeed, the close of a long, eventful 
century of transition. Already the political 
heirs of Rome and Byzantium were looming up, 
both East and West. In the East, fanatic, con- 
quering Islam awaited impatiently the tocsin of 
its almost irresistible propaganda, and in the 
West the Frank was striding through war and 
anarchy and every moral enormity to the brill- 
iant destiny of continental empire. We may 
imagine the problems that beset at this moment 
the mind of a Boethius or a Cassiodorus. 
Would the fruits of a thousand years of Greek 
and Roman culture be utterly blotted out? 



GREGORY THE GREAT, 13 

Would the gentleness and refinement that long 
centuries of external peace and world-wide com- 
merce and widest domination had begotten be 
lost to the race of man ? Would the teachings 
of Jesus Christ, the source of so much social 
betterment, be overlaid by some Oriental fanati- 
cism or hopelessly degraded by the coarse natu- 
ralism of the Northern barbarians ? Could it be 
that in this storm were about to be ingulfed the 
very highest conquests of man over nature and 
over himself, the delicate and difficult art of 
government, the most polished instruments of 
speech, the rarest embodiments of ideal thought 
in every art, that sweet spiritual amity, the fruit 
of religious faith and hope, that common 
Christian atmosphere in which all men moved 
and breathed and rejoiced ? 

We all know what it was that in these cen- 
turies of commotion and demolition saved from 
utter loss so much of the intellectual inheritance 
of the Graeco-Roman world, what power tamed 
and civilized the barbarian masters of the West- 
ern Empire, fixed them to the soil, codified and 
purified their laws, and insensibly and indirectly 
introduced among them no small share of that 
Roman civilization which they once so heartily 
b^ted; and which in their pagan days they looked 



14 GBEGOBY THE GREAT, 

on as utterly incompatible with Teutonic man- 
hood and freedom. It was the Catholic hierarchy 
which took upon itself the burden and responsi- 
bility of civil order and progress at a time when 
absolute anarchy prevailed, and around which 
centred all those elements of the old classic 
world that were destined, under its aBgis, to 
traverse the ages and go on forever, moulding 
the thought and life of humanity as long as men 
shall admire the beautiful, or reverence truth, or 
follow after order and justice and civil security. 
It was the bishops, monks, and priests of the 
Catholic Church who in those troublous days 
stood like a wall for the highest goods of society 
as well as for the rights of the soul ; who resisted 
in person the oppression o^ the barbarian chief 
just emerged from his swamps and forests, as 
well as the avarice and unpatriotic greed of the 
Roman who preyed upon his country's ills ; who 
roused the fainting citizens, repaired the broken 
walls, led men to battle, mounted guard upon 
the ramparts, ai;id negotiated treaties. Indeed, 
there was no one else in the ruinous and totter- 
ing State to whom men could turn for protection 
from one another as well as from the barbarian. 
It seemed, for a long time, as if society were 
returning to its original elements, such as it had 



GREGORY THE GREAT, 15 

once been in the hands of its Architect, and that 
no one could better administer on its dislocated 
machinery than the men who directly represented 
that divine providence and love out of which 
human society had arisen. 

The keystone of this extraordinary episcopate 
was the papacy. The Bishop of Rome shared 
with all other bishops of the empire their in- 
fluence over the municipal administration and 
finances, their quasi-control of the police, the 
prisons, and the public works, the right to sit as 
judge, not alone over clerics and in clerical cases, 
but in profane matters, and to receive the ap- 
peals of those who felt themselves wronged by 
the civil official. Like all other bishops of the 
sixth century, he was a legal and powerful check 
upon the rapacity, the ignorance, and the collu- 
sion of the great body of officials who directed 
the intricate mechanism of Byzantine administra- 
tion. But over and above this the whole world 
knew that he was the successor of the most 
illustrious of the apostles, whose legacy of 
authority he had never suffered to dwindle; 
that he was the metropolitan of Italy, and the 
patriarch of the entire West, all of whose 
churches had been founded directly or indirectly 
by his see. 



16 * GBEGOBY THE GREAT. 

From the time of Constantine his authority in 
the West had been frequently acknowledged and 
confirmed by the State and the bishops. In 
deferring to his decision the incipient schism of 
the Donatists, the victor of the Milvian Bridge 
only accepted the situation such as it was out- 
lined at Aries and Antioch and Sardica, such as 
Valentinian formally proclaimed it, and the 
Pragmatic Sanction of Justinian made the funda- 
mental law of the State. Long before Constan- 
tine, the Bishop of Eome seemed to Decius and 
Aurelian the most prominent of the Christian 
bishops, and since then every succeeding pon- 
tificate raised him higher in the public esteem. 

Occasionally a man of transcendent genius, 
like Leo the Great, broke the usual high level of 
superiority, and shone as the saviour of the State 
and the scourge of heresy; or again, skilful 
administrators like Gelasius and Hormisdas 
piloted happily the bark of Peter through ugly 
shoals and rapids. But, whatever their gifts or 
character, one identic consciousness survived 
through all of them — the sense of a supreme 
mission and of the most exalted responsibility in 
ecclesiastical matters. Did ever that serene 
consciousness of authority need to be intensified ? 
What a world of suggestion and illustration lay 



GBEGOBY THE GREAT. 17 

about them in their very episcopal city, where at 
every step the monuments of universal domina- 
tion met their gaze, where the very atmosphere 
was eloquent with the souvenirs of imperial 
mastery and the stubborn execution of the 
imperial will, where the local mementoes of 
their own steady upward growth yet confronted 
them, where they could stand in old St. Peter's, 
even then one of the most admired buildings 
of antiquity, over the bodies of Peter and Paul, 
surrounded by pilgrims from all parts of the 
world, and echo the words of the first Leo, that 
already the spiritual rule of the Roman pontiffs 
was wider than the temporal one of the Roman 
emperors had ever been ! 

It was to this office, and in the midst of such 
critical events as I have attempted to outline, 
that Gregory, whom after-ages have styled the 
Great, succeeded in 590 a.d. He could boast of 
the noblest blood of Rome, being born of one of 
the great senatorial families, a member of the 
gens Anicia, and destined from infancy to the 
highest political charges. His great-great-grand- 
father, Felix II. (483-492), had been Bishop of 
Rome, and he himself at an early age had held 
the office of praetor, and walked the streets of 
Rome in silken garments embroidered with 



18 GEEGOBY THE GBEAT. 

shining gems, and surrounded by a mob of clients 
and admirers. But he had been brought up in 
the strictest of Christian families, by a saintly 
mother ; and in time the blank horror of public 
life, the emptiness of human things in general, 
and the grave concern for his soul so worked 
upon the young noble that he threw up his 
promising camera, and, after distributing his 
great fortune to the poor, turned his own home 
on the Coelian Hill into a monastery, and took 
up his residence therein. It was with delibera- 
tion, and after satisfactory experience of the 
world and life, that he made this choice. It 
was a most sincere one, and though he was 
never to know much of the monastic silence and 
the calm lone-dwelling of the soul with God, 
these things ever remained his ideal, and his 
correspondence is filled with cries of anguish, 
with piteous yearnings for solitude and retire- 
ment. On the papal throne, dealing as an equal 
with emperors and exarchs, holding with firm 
hand the tiller of the ship of state on the 
angriest of seas, corresponding with kings, and 
building up the fabric of papal greatness, his 
mighty spirit sighs for the lonely cell, the 
obedience of the monk, the mystic submersion 
of self in the placid ocean of love and con- 



GBEGOBY THE GEE AT, 19 

templation. His austerities soon destroyed his 
health, and so he went through fourteen stormy 
years of government, broken in body and chafing 
in spirit, yet ever triumphant by the force of his 
superb, masterful will, and capable of dictating 
from his bed of pain the most successful of papal 
administrations, one which sums up at once the 
long centuries of organic development on classic 
soil and worthily opens the great drama of the 
Middle Ages. 

In fact, it is as the first of the mediaeval popes 
that Gregory claims our especial attention. His 
title to a place among the benefactors of human- 
ity reposes in great part upon enduring spiritual 
achievements which modified largely the history 
of the Western Empire, upon the firm assertion 
of principles which obtained without contradic- 
tion for nearly a thousand years, and upon his 
writings, which formed the heads and hearts of 
the best men in Church and State during the 
entire Middle Ages, and which, like a subtle 
indestructible aroma, are even yet operative in 
Christian society. 

The popes of the sixth century were not un- 
conscious of the fact that the greater part of the 
Western Empire had passed irrevocably into the 
hands of barbarian Teutons, nor were they 



20 GBEGOMY THE GREAT. 

entirely without relations with the new possessors 
of Koman soil; but their temporary subjection 
to an Arian king, the Gothic war, and the cruel 
trials of the city of Rome, the meteoric career 
of Justinian, as a rule deferential and favorable 
to the bishops of Rome, the painful episode of 
the Three Chapters, in which flamed up once 
more the smouldering embers of the great 
christological discussions, the uncertain re- 
lations with the new imperial office of the 
exarchate, as well as a clinging reverence for the 
empire and its institutions, kept their faces 
turned to the Golden Horn. They had welcomed 
Clovis into the church with a prophetic instinct 
of the role that his descendants were to play, 
and they kept an eye upon the Catholic Goths, 
on the Suabians of Northwestern Spain, and on 
the Irish Kelts. Individual and sporadic mis- 
sionary efforts originated among their clergy, of 
which we would know more were it not for the 
almost complete destruction of their local annals 
and archives in the Gothic wars. But withal, 
one feels that these sixth-century popes belong 
yet to the old Graeco-Roman world, that they 
hesitate to acknowledge publicly that the im- 
perial cause is lost in the West, that the splendid 
unity of the Roman and the Christian name is 



GBEGOBT THE GREAT. 21 

only a souvenir. On the other hand, the barba- 
rian was too often a heretic, too often slippery, 
selfish, and treacherous, while the Roman was 
yet a man of refinement and culture, loath to go 
out among uncouth tribes who had destroyed 
whatever he held dear. In a word, he nourished 
toward the barbarian world at large that natural 
repulsion which he afterward reproached the 
British Kelt for entertaining toward the Saxon 
destroyer of his fireside and his independence. 

Gregory inaugurated a larger policy. He was 
the first monk to sit on the Chair of Peter, and 
he brought to that redoubtable office a mind 
free from minor preoccupations and devoted to 
the real interests of the Roman Church. He 
had been praetor and nuncio, had moved much 
among the bishops and the aristocracy of the 
Catholic world, and was well aware of the 
inferior and painful situation that the New Rome 
was preparing for her elder predecessor. The 
careers of Silverius, Yigilius, and Pelagius were 
yet fresh in the minds of men, and it needed not 
much discernment to see that, under the new 
regime, the Byzantine court would never will- 
ingly tolerate the ancient independence and tra- 
ditional boldness of the Roman bishops. 

It was, therefore, high time to find a balance 



22 GREGOBT THE GEE AT, 

to the encroachments and sinister designs of 
those Greeks on the Bosphorus, who were drift- 
ing ever further away from the Latin spirit and 
ideals ; this the genius of Gregory discovered in 
the young barbarian nations of the West. It 
would be wrong, however, to see in his conduct 
only the cold calculations of a statesman. It 
was influenced simultaneously by the deep 
yearnings of the apostle, by the purest zeal for 
the salvation and betterment of the new races 
which lay about him like a whitening harvest, 
waiting for the sickle of the spiritual husband- 
man. While yet a simple monk he had extorted 
from Pelagius the permission to evangelize the 
Angles and the Saxons, and had proceeded some 
distance when the Romans discovered their loss 
and insisted on his return. Were it not for 
their selfishness he would have reached the 
shores of Britain, and gained perhaps a place in 
the charmed circle of King Arthur and the 
Knights of the Round Table, who were during 
that century engaged in the losing conflict for 
independence which ended so disastrously at the 
Badonic Mount. 

This is not the place to relate the details of 
the numerous relations which Gregory established 
on all sides with the barbarian peoples of Europe. 



GREGOBY THE GEE AT, 23 

The nearest to him were the Lombards, that 
resistless hammer of the Italo-Roman state, and 
one of the most arrogant and intractable of all 
the Teutonic tribes. His policy with them is 
peace at any price. Now he purchases it with 
Church gold, sorely needed elsewhere ; and again 
he concludes a treaty with these iron dukes in 
the very teeth of the exarch. He takes their 
rule as an accomplished fact. He refuses to be 
an accomplice in the base, inhuman measures of 
the Byzantine governors. He rests not until he 
has converted their queen Theodelinda, and 
their king Agilulf; with a certain mixture of 
bitterness and joy he proclaims himself more a 
bishop of the Lombards than the Romans, so 
numerous were their camp-fires upon the Cam- 
pagna, and so famihar the sight of their hirsute 
visages and the sound of their horrid gutturals 
among the delicate and high-bred denizens of 
Eome. 

It was he who restrained this rugged and 
contemptuous race ; who started among them a 
counter current against their brutal paganism 
and their cold, narrow, unsentimental Arianism ; 
who left to them, in his own person and memory, 
the most exalted type of Christian manhood 
— at once fearless and gentle, aggressive and 



24 GBEGOET THE GREAT, 

enduring, liberal and constant, loyal to a decay- 
ing, incapable empire, but shrewd and far-seeing 
for the interests of Western humanity, whose 
future renaissance he must have vaguely felt as 
well as an Augustine or a Salvian. 

Beyond the Alps the descendants of Clovis 
had consolidated all of Gaul under Frankish rule. 
Though Catholics, they were too often purely 
natural barbarians, restrained with difficulty 
from the greatest excesses, and guilty in every 
reign of wanton oppression of Church and people. 
They sold the episcopal sees to the highest bidder, 
and they often intruded into these places of 
honor and influence their soldiers or their 
courtiers. With great tact and prudence 
Gregory dealt with these semi-Christian kings. 
In his correspondence he argues at length, and 
explains the evils of a simoniacal episcopate ; he 
pleads for a just and mild administration; he 
warns them not to exert their power to the 
utmost, but to temper justice with mercy, and to 
learn the art of self-control. In all the range of 
papal letters there is scarcely anything more 
noble than the correspondence of Gregory with 
the kings of Gaul, Spain, and England. This 
fine Roman patrician, this ex-prsetor, recalls the 
palmy days of republican Rome, when her con- 



GBEGOBY THE GBEAT. 25 

suls and legates smoothed the way of success as 
much by their diplomacy as by their military 
skill. He speaks with dignity to these rugged 
kings, these ex-barbarian chieftains, yet with 
grave tenderness and sympathy. He recognizes 
their rank and authority, their prowess and their 
merits. He reminds them that they are but 
earthly instruments of the heavenly King, and 
that their office entails a grave responsibility, 
personal and official. At times he dares to in- 
sinuate a rebuke, but in sweet and well-chosen 
words. He ranks them with Constantine and 
Helen, the benefactors of the Roman see. His 
language is generally brief, but noble, courteous, 
earnest, penetrating, and admirably calculated 
to make an impression upon warlike and im- 
tutored men, who were delighted and flattered 
at such treatment from the uncrowned head of 
the Western civilization. Childebert and Brune- 
haut, Recared and Ethelbert and Bertha, be- 
came powerful allies in his apostolic designs, 
and opened that long and beneficent career of 
early mediaeval Christianity when the youthful 
nations grew strong and coalesced under the 
tutelage of the papacy, which healed their dis- 
cords, knitted them together, and transmitted to 
them the spirit, the laws, the tongues, the arts, 



26 GBEGOBY THE GBEAT, 

and the culture of Greece and Rome — treasures 
that, in all probability, would otherwise have 
perished utterly. 

We are in great measure the descendants of 
these ancient tribes, now become the nations of 
Europe, and we cannot disown the debt of grati- 
tude that we owe to the memory of that Roman 
who first embraced, with an all-absorbing love, 
the Frank, the Lombard, and the Gael, the Os- 
trogoth and the Visigoth, the Schwab, the 
Wend, and the Low-Dutch pirates of the Elbe 
and the Weser. Hitherto their chiefs had es- 
teemed the vicarious lieutenancy of Rome, so 
deep-rooted was their esteem for the genius of 
the empire. But they knew now what a pro- 
found transformation was worked in the West, 
and they began the career of independent na- 
tions, exulting in their strength. Politically 
they were forever lost to the central trunk of 
the empire, but they were saved for higher 
things, for the thousand influences of Roman 
thought and experience. They wei'e made 
chosen vessels, not alone of religion, but of the 
arts and sciences, of philosophy and govern- 
ment, and of that delicate, refined idealism, 
that rare and precious bloom of long ages of 
sincere Christian life and conduct, which would 



GREGORY THE GREAT, .27 

surely have perished in a new atmosphere of 
simple naturalism. 

No act of Gregory's eventful career has had 
such momentous consequences as the conversion 
of the Angles and the Saxons. They were, if 
possible, a more hopeless lot than the Lombards, 
revengeful, avaricious, and lustful, knowing only 
one vice — cowardice — and practising but one 
virtue — courage. Though distant, the fame of 
their brutality had reached the ends of the 
earth. Moreover, they had already nearly ex- 
terminated a flourishing Christianity, that of 
Keltic Britain. In a word, they were not so 
very urjike the Iroquois when Brebeuf and 
Lallemant undertook their evangelization. I 
need not go over the recital of their conver- 
sion. All his life Gregory cherished this act 
as the greatest of his life. He refers to it in 
his correspondence with the East, and it con- 
soled him in the midst of failures and discour- 
agements. His great soul shines out through 
the pages of Bede, who has left us a detailed 
narrative of this event — his boundless confi- 
dence in God, his use of purely spiritual weap- 
ons, his large and timely toleration. For these 
rude Saxons he would enlist all the sympathy 
of the Franks and the cooperation of the British 



28 GBEGOBY TEE GREAT. ^ 

clergy. He directs in minutest detail the prog- 
ress of the mission, and provides during life the 
men and means needed to carry it on. Truly 
he may be called the apostle of the English, for, 
though he never touched their soil, he burned 
with the desire to die among them and for them, 
he opened to them the gate of the heavenly 
kingdom, and introduced them to the art and 
literature and culture of the great Christian 
body on the continent. 

Henceforth the Saxon was no longer the Red 
Indian of the classic peoples, but a member of 
the world-wide Church. Quicker than Frank or 
Lombard he caught the spirit of Rom«, and as 
long as he held the soil of England was un- 
swervingly faithful to her. Through her came 
all his culture — the fine arts and music and 
the love of letters. His books came from her 
libraries, and she sent him his first architects 
and masons. From her, too, he received with 
the faith the principles of Roman law and pro- 
cedure. When he went abroad, it was to her 
that he turned his footsteps ; and when he wear- 
ied of life in his pleasant island home, he be- 
took himself to Rome to end his days beneath 
the shadow of St. Peter. In the long history 
of Christian Rome she never knew a more 



GREGORY THE GREAT, 29 

romantic and deep-set attacliment on the part 
of any people than that of the Angles and the 
Saxons, who for centuries cast at her feet not 
only their faith and their hearts, but their lives, 
their crowns, and their very home itself. Surely 
there must have been something extraordinary 
in the character of their first apostle, a great 
well-spring of affection, a happy and sympathetic 
estimate of the national character, to call forth 
such an outpouring of gratitude, and such a 
devotion, not only to the Church of Rome, but 
to the civilization that she represented. To-day 
the English-speaking peoples are in the van of 
all human progress and culture, and the English 
tongue is likely to become at no distant date 
the chief vehicle of human thought and hope. 
Both these peoples and their tongue are to-day 
great composites, whose elements it would not 
be easy to segregate. But away back at their 
fountain-head, where they first issue from the 
twilight of history, there stands a great and 
noble figure who gave them their first impetus 
on the path of religion and refinement, and to 
whom must always belong a large share of the 
credit which they enjoy. 

As pope and administrator of the succession 
of Peter, Gregory ranks among the greatest of 



30 GREGOBT THE GREAT, 

that series. His personal sanctity, his influence 
as a preacher, his interest in the public worship, 
and his devotion to the poor, are only what we 
might expect from a zealous monastic bishop; 
but Gregory was eminent in all these, while 
surpassingly great in other things. No pope 
has ever exercised so much influence by his 
writings, on which the Middle Ages were largely 
formed as far as practical ethics and the dis- 
cipline of life were concerned. They were in 
every monastery, and were thumbed over by 
every cleric. Above all, his book of the " Pas- 
toral Rule " fashioned the episcopate of the 
Middle Ages. By the rarest of compliments, 
this golden booklet was translated into Greek, 
and Alfred the Great put it into Anglo-Saxon. 
It was the vade-mecum of every good bishop 
throughout Europe, and a copy of it was given 
to every one at his consecration. It was reck- 
oned among the essential books that every 
priest was expected to own, and it would not be 
too much to say that, after the Bible^ no work 
exercised so great an influence for a thousand 
years as this little manual of clerical duties and 
ideals. It filled the place which the ^^ Imitation 
of Christ " has taken in later times ; and in the 
direct, rugged Latin of its periods, in the stern, 



GREGORY THE GREAT. 31 

uncompromising doctrine of its author, in its 
practical active tendency, in its emphasis on 
the public social duties of the bishop, and in its 
blending of the heavenly and the earthly king- 
doms, are to be found several of the distinctive 
traits of the mediaeval episcopate. He laid out 
the work for the mediaeval popes, and in his 
person and career was a worthy type of the 
bravest and the most politic among them. 
Though living in very critical times, he main- 
tained the trust confided to him and handed it 
over increased to his successors. There is no 
finer model of the Latin Christian spirit ; and 
some will like to think that he was put there, 
at the confi.nes of the old and the new, between 
Romania and Gothia, to withstand the flood of 
Byzantinism, to save the Western barbarian for 
Latin influences, and to secure to Europe the 
transmission of the larger and more congenial 
Latin culture. 

Yet he was, like all the Catholic bishops of 
that age, devoted to the ideal of the Christian 
Empire, and while he recognized the hand of 
Providence in the breaking up of the once 
proud system, he did not spare the expression 
and the proof of bis loyalty to the emperors at 
Constantinople. Though virtually the founder 



32 GBEGORT THE GEE AT. 

of the temporal power of the papacy, he ever 
held his temporal estate for ajid under New 
Eome, and was never happier than when he 
could safeguard or advance her interests. Like 
most men of his time, he believed that the last 
of the great empires was that of Rome, and that 
when it fell the end of the world was close at 
hand. Indeed, the well-known couplet (made 
famous by Anglo-Saxon pilgrims) belongs to 
his epoch, and strikingly conveys the popular 
feeling : — 

"While stands the Colosseum, Rome shall stand; 
When falls the Colosseum, Rome shall fall ; 
And when Rome falls, the world." 

Long ages have gone by since he was gath- 
ered to his rest (604) in the portico of old St. 
Peter's, with Julius and Daraasus, Leo and 
Gelasius, and all the long line of men who 
built up the spiritual greatness of Eome. Le- 
gends have gathered about his memory, like 
mosses and streamers on the venerable oak, 
and calumny has aimed sonie poisoned shafts 
at his secular fame. But history defends him 
from the unconscious transformation of the 
one, and the intentional malice of the other, 
which ever loves a shining mark. She shows 
to the admiring ages his portrait, high-niched 



GBEGOBT THE GBEAT. 33 

in the temple of fame^ among the benefactors 
of humanity, the protector of the poor and the 
feeble against titled wealth and legalized op- 
pression, the apostle of nations once shrouded 
in darkness, now the foremost torch-bearers of 
humanity. He appeared to posterity as one of 
that very small number of men who, holding 
the highest authority, administer it without 
fault, lead unblemished lives, and find time and 
opportunity to heal, with voice and pen and 
hand, the ills of a suffering w^orld, and advance 
its children on a path of unbroken progress, 
guided by the genius of pure religion, consoled, 
elevated, and purified by all that the noblest 
thought and the widest experience of the past 
can offer.^ 



1 The works of Gregory the Great are reprinted in Migne (Pl. 
Ixxv.-lxxix.) from the Benedictine edition of Sainte Marthe (Paris, 
1705, 4 vols. foL). A critical edition of his "Registrum Episto- 
Tarum," or "Letter-Book," is now at hand, owing to the learned 
industry of P. Ewald and L. M. Hartmann (Mon. Germ. Hist. 
Epistolse, I. -II., Berlin, 1891-1899). His account of St. Benedict 
has been reedited from the "Dialogues" by P. Cozza-Luzzi 
(Rome, 1880), and the " Homilies," by G. Pfeilschifter, under the 
auspices of Dr. Knopfler's "Seminary of Church History" 
(Munich, 1900). There is an English translation of the "Regula 
Pastoralis," or "Shepherd's Book," by H. R. Bramley (London, 
1874). The English philologian, Henry Sweet, edited and trans- 
lated into English the West Saxon version made by King Alfred 
for the edification of his, priests and people (Early English Text 
Society Publications, Londo-n, 1871). Concerning his correspon- 



34 GBEGOBY THE GBEAT. 

dence with St. Augustine of Canterbury on the toleration of heathen 
customs, cf. Duchesne, " Origines du Culte Chretien " (Paris, 1899, 
1902), and Sagmliller, Theol. Quartal. Schrift. (1899), Vol. 160. 
The age and authenticity of the " Sacramentary," or Old Roman 
Missal, that goes under his name, are discussed by Duchesne (op. 
cit.) and by Dr. Probst in a work of much erudition, " Die abend- 
landische Messe vom V. bis zum VII. Jahrhundert" (Mtinster, 
1896). The origins of the so-called Gregorian Chant are treated by 
r. A. Gevaert, " Les Origines du Chant Liturgique de I'Eglise 
Latine " (Gand, 1900), and " La M^lopee Antique dans le Chant de 
I'Eglise Latine" (Gand, 1895) ; cf. G. Morin, "L'Originedu Chant 
Gr^gorien (Paris, 1890). The oldest printed lives of Gregory the 
Great are those by Paulus Diaconus, at the end of the eighth cen- 
tury, and by Johannes Diaconus (Migne, Pl. Ixxxv. 59-242) about 
872 or 873. There is said to exist in England a manuscript life of him 
composed at a still earlier date. Among the latest and best works 
on this great pope are Wisbaum, "Die wichtigsten Einrichtungen 
und Ziele der Thatigkeit des Papstes Gregor d. Gr." (Leipzig, 1885) ; 
Clausier, "St. Gregoire le Grand, Pape et Docteur de PEgiise" 
(Paris, 1886) ; C. Wolfsgruber, "Gregor d. Gr." (Saulgau, 1890), 
and the articles entitled "II Pontificato di S. Gregorio Magno nella 
Storia della Civiltk Cristiana" in the Givilta GattoUca (1890-93), 
Series XIV. , Vols. 5-9, and XV., Vols. 1-&. A useful account of his 
life is that of Abbot Snow in the " Heroes of the Cross " series (Lon- 
don, Th. Baker, 1897). The celebration of the thirteenth centenary 
of his death (604) will doubtless call forth many learned tributes to 
his manifold greatness and significance. His relations to the Em- 
peror Phocas are discussed by * Fr. Gorres in the Zeitschrift fur 
wissenschaftliche Theologie (1901), Yo\. XLIV.,pp. 592-602, and the 
accusation of ignorantism, by * R. Labbadini, " Gregorio Magno e la 
Grammatica," in Bullettino difilologia dassica (1902), Vol. VIIL, 
pp. 204-206, 259 ; cf. *Er. and P. Bohringer, " Die Vater des Paps- 
thums Leo I. und Gregor I." (Stuttgart, 1879), in the new edition 
of " Die Kirche Christi und ihre Zeugen." The asterisked writers 
are non-Catholic. For a full bibliography of Gregory the Great 
cf. the new edition of Chevalier's " Repertoire Historique du Moyen 
Age," and the second edition of Potthast, " Bibliotheca Historica 
Medii ^vi." The reader may consult with profit the historians 
of the City of Rome, Gregorovius, von Reumont, and Grisar, and for 
a literary appreciation of the pope the classical (German) work of 
Ebert on the "Latin Literature of the Early Middle Ages." 



JUSTINIAN THE GREAT (A.D. 527-565). 

Peehaps the most crucial period of Christian 
history, after the foundation century of Christ 
and the apostles, is the sixth century of our era. 
Then goes on a kind of clearing-house settle- 
ment of the long struggle between Christianity 
and paganism. It was no false instinct that 
made Dionysius the Little begin, shortly before 
the middle of that century, to date his chronol- 
ogy from the birth of Christ, for then disap- 
peared from daily use the oldest symbols of 
that pagan civil power which had so strenuously 
disputed with the new religion every step of its 
progress. The annual consulship was then abol- 
ished, or retained only by the emperor as an 
archaic title. That immemorial root of Roman 
magistracy, the thrice-holy symbol of the City's 
majestas, could rightly pass away when the City 
had fulfilled its mission and function in the 
ancient world. The Roman Senate, too, passed 
away at the same period — what calls itself 
the Roman Senate at a later time is a purely 
local and municipal institution. The old relig- 

35 



36 JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT. 

ion of Rome was finally no more than a mem- 
ory. For the two preceding centuries it had 
gone on, sullenly shrinking from one level of 
society to another, until its last representatives 
were an individual here and there, hidden in the 
mighty multitudes of the Christian people of the 
empire.^ The schools of literature, philosophy, 
and rhetoric were no longer ensouled with the 
principles of Hellenism. Their last hope was 
buried when the Neoplatonists of Athens took 
the road of exile to beg from the Great King, 
that born enemy of the Roman name — the 
prophet of "Medism" — a shelter and support.^ 
In dress, in the system of names, in the popular 
literature, in the social institutes, in the spoken 
language,^ in the domestic and public architec- 

IV. Schultze, "Untergang des griechisch-romischen Heiden- 
tums " (Jena, 1892), Vol. II., pp. 385-389 ; cf. also pp. 214, 215. The 
documents for the disappearance of Western paiganism are best col- 
lected in Beugnot, "Histoire de la destruction du paganisme en 
Occident" (2 vols., Paris, 1835). Since then it is the subject of 
many learned works. 

2 Gregorovius, " Geschichte der Stadt Athen im Mittelalter," 
Vol. I., p. 58, does not believe that any formal edict was issued by 
Justinian against the continuance of the pagan schools ; they lapsed 
into desuetude. 

3 Bury, "The Language of the Komaioi in the Sixth Century," 
"History of the Later Roman Empire," Vol. II., pp. 167-174; Free- 
man, " Some Points in the Later History of the Greek Language," 
Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. III. (1882) ; Tozer, "The Greek- 
speaking Population of Southern Italy," ibid:, Vol. X., pp. 11-42 
(1889). 



JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 37 

ture, in the spirit of the law, in legal procedure, 
in the character of city government, in the ad- 
ministration of the provinces, in the very con- 
cept of the State and of empire, there are so 
many signs that the old order passeth away 
and a new one even now standeth in its place. 
The symptoms of internal trouble, noted on all 
sides from the time of Marcus Aurelius and 
graphically diagnosed by St. Cyprian, had gone 
on multiplying. They did not portend that 
decay which is the forerunner of death, as 
many had thought while the ancient society was 
dissolving before their eyes,^ but that decay 
which is the agent of great and salutary 
changes. Their first phase, the long and 
eventful Wandering of the Nations, had broken 
up. East and West, the old framework of society 
as the Greek and Roman had inherited, created, 
or modified it. On the other hand, that most 
thorough of all known forces, the spirit of Jesus 
Christ, had been working for fifteen generations 
in the vitals of this ancient society, disturbing, 
cleansing, casting forth, healing, binding, reno- 
vating, a social and political organism that- — 

1 "Sic quodcumque nunc nascitur mundi ipsius senectute de- 
generat, ut nemo mirari deberet singula in mundo deficere ccepisse, 
cum ipse jam mundus totus in defectione sit et fine." — St. Cyfkian, 
"Ad Demetrianum," c. 4, ed. Hartel. 



38 JUSTINIAN THE GEE AT. 

" Lay sick for many centuries in great error." 

In such periods of history much depends on 
the ideals and character of the man or men who 
stand at the helm of a society that is working 
its way through the straits and shoals of transi- 
tion. Was it not fortunate for Europe that a 
man like Charlemagne arose on the last limits 
of the old classical world, with heart and brain 
and hand enoiigh to plan and execute a political 
basis sufficiently strong to hold for centuries 
to come the new States of Western Christen- 
dom? 

It is here that Justinian enters on the stage 
of history and claims a place higher than that 
of Charlemagne; second to that of no ruler who 
has affected for good the interests of his fellow- 
men. He is not, I admit, a very lovable figure. 
He stands too well within the limits of the 
Grseco-Roman time to wear the illusive halo 
of Teutonic romance. But in the history of 
humankind those names shine longest and 
brightest which are associated with the most 
universal and permanent benefits. Is he a bene- 
factor of society who makes two blades of grass 
to grow where but one grew before ? Then what 
shall we say of one who established for all time 
the immortal principles of order and justice and 



JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT. 39 

equity, without which all human endeavor is un- 
certain and usually sinks to the lowest level ? ^ 

1 The principal authority for the life and works of Justinian is 
the contemporary Procopius, the secretary and lieutenant of Beli- 
sarius. In his account of the Gothic, Vandal, and Persian war» 
he exhausts the military history of the empire. His work on the 
buildings of Justinian and the "Anecdota" or "Secret History" 
that bears his name are entirely devoted to the emperor, the former 
in adulation, the latter in virulent condemnation. Agathias, also a 
contemporary, has left us an unfinished work on the reign of Jus- 
tinian that deals chiefly with the wars of 552-558. To John Lydus, 
one of the imperial officers, we owe an account of the civil service 
under Justinian. Theophanes, a writer of the end of the sixth 
century, has left some details of the career of the emperor. The 
" Church History " of Evagrius and the " Breviarium " of the Car- 
thaginian deacon Liberatus are of first-class value for the ecclesi- 
astical events. His own laws (Codex Constitutionum and Novelise) 
and his correspondence, e.g. with the bishops of Eome, are sources 
of primary worth, as are also at tins point the "Liber Pontificalis" 
and the correspondence of the popes with Constantinople. In his 
chapters on Justinian, Gibbon followed closely Le Beau, "Histoire 
du Bas Empire" (Paris, 1757-84). Among the general historians 
of Greece in the past century who deal with the events of this reign 
are to be named Finlay, " A History of Greece " from its conquest 
by the Komans to the present time (146 b.c. to 1864 a.d.), new 
and revised edition by H. F. Tozer (Oxford, 1877, 7 vols.) ; Bury, 
" A History of the Later Roman Empire from Arcadius to Irene " 
(395-800) (2 vols., London, 1887). The German histories of Greece 
by Hopf (1873), Hertzberg (1876-78), Gregorovius (histories of 
mediaeval Rome and Athens, 1889), and the modern Greek histories 
of Paparrigopoulos (1887-88) and Lambros (1888) cover the same 
ground, though they differ considerably in method and apprecia- 
tions. There is an "Histoire de Justinien " (Paris, 1856), by 
Isambert, very superficial and imperfect, and a life of the empress 
by Debidour, " L'Imp6ratrice Theodora" (Paris, 1885), to which 
may be added Mallet's essay on Theodora in the English Histori- 
cal Beview for January, 1887. Several essays of Gfrorer in his 
"Byzantinische Geschichten" (Graz, 3 vols., 1872-77), notably pp. 
315-401, are both instructive and picturesque. For all questions 



40 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 

I. 

Justinian was born in 482 or 483, near Sardica, 
the modern Sophia and capital of the present 
kingdom of Bulgaria. The most brilliant of his 
historians says that he came of an obscure race 
of barbarians.^ Nevertheless, in an empire every 



of chronology pertaining to the reign of Justinian the reader may- 
consult the classic work of Clinton, "Fasti Eomani : The Civil and 
Literary Chronology of Rome and Constantinople" (to a.d. 641), 
(Oxford, 2 vols., 1845-50) ; cf. also Muralt, " Essai de Chronographie 
Byzantine" (St. Petersburg, 2 vols., 1855-73), and H. Gelzer, 
" Sextus Julius Africanus " (Leipzig, 1880-85). 

An attempt has been made to collect the Greek Christian in- 
scriptions from the fifth to the eighteenth century. " Inscriptions 
Grecques Chr^tiennes " (St. Petersburg, 1876-80), pp. 11-143. 
Mgr. Duchesne and M. HomoUe promise a complete "Corpus." 
Cf. Bulletin Critique (October 5, 1900, p, 556). The coins 
and medals of the period are best illustrated in Schlumberger's 
" Sigillographie de I'Empire Byzantin" (Paris, 1884), a work that 
rounds out and replaces the earlier treatises of De Saulcy, Banduri, 
Eckel, and Cohen. 

1 It is worth noting that the Slavonic origin of Justinian has 
lately been called in question by James Bryce, English Historical 
Heview (1887), Vol. II., pp. 657-686. It is said to have no other 
foundation than the biography by a certain Bogomilus or Theophilos, 
an imaginary teacher of Justinian. This biography is not otherwise 
mentioned or vouched for than in the Latin life of Justinian by 
Johannes Marnavich, Canon of Sebenico (d. 1639). Bryce holds 
that Marnavich gives us only echoes of a Slavonic saga about Jus- 
tinian. Jiricek ("Archiv fur Slavische Philologie" (1888), Vol. 
II., pp. 300-304) condemns the whole story as a forgery of Marna- 
vich. Thereby would fall to the ground all that Alemannus, the first 
editor of the "Anecdota" of Procopius (1623), writes concerning 
the Slavonic genealogy, name, etc., of Justinian. Cf. Krumbacher, 
"Geschichte der byzantinischen Literatur" (Munich, 1891), p. 46. 



JUSTINIAN THE GEE AT, 41 

soldier carries a marshal's baton in his knapsack, 
and an uncle of Justinian was such a lucky 
soldier. Justin I. (518-527) may have been quite 
such another " paysan du Danube " as Lafontaine 
describes in one of his most perfect fables (XI. 6) : 

" Son menton nourrissait une barbe touffue. 
Toute sa personne velue 
Representait un ours, mais un ours mal l^chd. 
Sous un sourcil epais il avait I'oeil caclie, 
Le regard de travers, nez tortu, grosse levre : 
Portait sayon de poll de chevre, 
Et ceinture de joncs marins." 

He may have been not unlike the good Ursus 
in " Quo Vadis/' or that uncouth Dacian in 
" Fabiola." Certain it is that in a long service 
of fifty years he rose from rank to rank and 
succeeded, with universal consent, to Anastasius 
when that hated "Manichaean" died childless. 
The peasants of Dacia were no longer butchered 
to make a Roman holiday — the land had long 
been Romanized, had even furnished the empire 
with a succession of strong and intelligent 
rulers, those Illyrian emperors whom Mr. 
Freeman has so magisterially described. Jus- 
tin was an uneducated barbarian, and cut his 
signature painfully through a gold stencil plate, 
as did his contemporary, the great Ostrogoth 
Theodoric, king of Italy. Yet he had the wis- 



42 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 

dom of experience, the accumulated treasures of 
the sordid Anastasius, the counsel of good civil 
officers, old ^nd tried friends in many an Isau- 
rian, many a Persian, campaign. Above all, he 
had the devotion of his youthful nephew, Jus- 
tinian. Possible pretenders to the throne were 
removed without scruple — a principle that has 
always been prevalent by the Golden Horn. 
Before Justin died his nephew had reached the 
command of all the imperial forces, though 
never himself a warlike man. In 527, on the 
death of his uncle, he found himself, at the age 
of thirty-six, sole master of the Eoman Empire. 
It was no poor or mean inheritance even then, 
after the drums and tramplings of a dozen con- 
quests. The West, indeed, was gone — it seemed 
irretrievably. At Pa via and Ravenna the royal 
Ostrogoth governed an Italian State greater 
than history has seen since that time. At Tou- 
louse and Barcelona the Yisigoth yet disposed 
of Spain and Southern Gaul. At Paris and 
Orleans and Soissons the children of Clovis 
meditated vaguely an empire of the Franks. 
The Rhineland and the eternal hills of Helvetia, 
where so much genuine Roman blood had been 
spilled, were again a prey to anarchy. Britain, 
that pearl of the empire, was the scene of tri- 



JUSTINIAN THE GEEAT. 43 

umphant piracy, the new home of a half dozen 
Low-Dutch sea tribes that had profited by the 
great State's hour of trial to steal one of her 
fairest provinces, and were obliterating in blood 
the faintest traces of her civilizing presence. 
Even in the Orient, where the empire stood 
rocklike, fixed amid the seething waters of the 
Bosphorus, the Hellespont, and the Euxine, it 
knew no peace. The ambition of the Sassanids 
of Persia threatened the vast level plains of 
Mesopotamia, while a new and inexhaustible 
enemy lifted its savage head along the Danube 
frontier — a vague complexus of Hunnish and 
Slavonic tribes, terrible in their numbers and 
their indefiniteness, thirsting for gold, amenable 
to no civilization, rejoicing in rapine and mur- 
der and universal disorder. Justinian must 
have often felt, with Henry the Fourth, that 
the wet sea-boy, "cradled in the rude imperious 
surge," was happier than the king. Withal, 
the empire was yet the only Mediterranean 
State. It yet held Syria and Egypt. Asia Minor 
was faithful. The Balkan provinces, though 
much troubled, and poor harassed Greece were 
imperial lands. ^ The empire alone had navies 

1 The political geography of the empire in the sixth century may 
he studied in "Hieroclis Synecdemus," edition of Gustav Parthey 



44 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 

and a regular army, drilled, equipped, officered.^ 
Alone as yet it had the paraphernalia of a well- 
appointed and ancient State — coinage, roads, 
transportation, justice, law, sure sanction, with 
arts and literature and all that is implied in the 
fair old Latin word humanitas. It stood yet 
for the thousand years of endeavor and progress 
that intervened from Herodotus to Justinian. 
And well it was for humanity that its destinies 
now passed into the hands of one who was 
penetrated with the keenest sense of responsi- 
bility to God and man. Though he reached the 
highest prize of life before his prime, it has been 
said of him that he was never young. The 
ashes of rebellion and insurrection had been 
smouldering in the royal city since, with the 
death of Marcian (457), the old, firm, Theodosian 
control had come to an end. The frightful 
political consequences of the great Monophysite 
heresy that was born with the Council of Chal- 
cedon (451) were dawning on the minds of 
thoughtful men. The Semitic and Coptic Orient 



(Berlin, 1866). Here are reprinted the " Notitise Episcopatuum " or 
catalogues of ecclesiastical divisions knowp usually as the ' ' Tac- 
tica." Cf. also Banduri, "Imperium Orientale" (Paris, 1711, fol.) ; 
"Antiquitates Constantinopolitanae" (Paris, 1729, fol.)- 

1 Gfrorer, " Byzantinische Studien," Vol. 11. , pp. 401-436; 
" Das byzantinische Seewesen." 



JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, 45 

was creating that shibboleth which would serve 
it for a thousand years against Greek and 
Roman — a blind and irrational protest against 
the real oppressions and humiliations it once 
underwent. Of its own initiative the empire 
had abandoned, for good or for ill, its historical 
basis and seat — Old Rome. It had quitted the 
yellow Tiber for the Golden Horn, to be nearer 
the scene of Oriental conflict, to face the Sassa- 
nid with the sea at its back, to create a suitable 
forum for the government of the world, where 
Christian principles might prevail, and where a 
certain inappeasable nemesis of secular wrong 
and injustice would not haunt the imperial soul 
as on the Palatine. But in the change of capital 
one thing was left behind — perhaps it was irre- 
movable — the soul of Old Rome, with all its 
stem and sober qualities, its practical cast and 
temper, its native horror of the shifty mysticism 
of the Orient and the unreality of the popular 
forms of Greek philosophy. There is some- 
thing pathetic in that phrase of Gregory the 
Great, " The art of arts is the government of 
souls." It is like an echo of the sixth book of 
Vergil, " Tu vero, Romane, imperare memento." 
Perhaps this is the germ of sohd truth in the 
legend that Constantine abandoned the civil au- 



46 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, 

• 

thority at Eome to Pope Silvester. He certainly 
did abandon, to the oldest and most consistent 
power on earth, — a power long since admired by 
an Alexander Severus and dreaded by a Decius 
— that rich inheritance of prestige and authority 
which lay embedded in the walls and monuments 
of ancient Rome. Within a century something 
of this dawned on the politicians of Constanti- 
nople and lies at the bottom of the long struggle 
to help its bishop to the ecclesiastical control of 
the Orient. In history there are no steps back- 
ward, and we need not wonder that Dante, the 
last consistent, if romantic, prophet of the em- 
pire, was wont to shiver with indignation at the 
thought of the consequences of this act. 

But if they lost the genuinely Roman soul of 
government, they gained a Greek soul. It was 
an old Greek city they took up — Byzantium. 
Its very atmosphere and soil were reeking with 
Hellenism, whose far-flung outpost it had long 
been. History, clunate, commerce, industries, 
the sinuous ways of the sea, the absence of Ro- 
man men and families, the contempt for the pure 
Orientals, forced the emperors at Constantinople 
from the beginning into the hands of a genuine 
local Hellenism that might have shed its old and 
native religion, but could not shed its soul, its 



JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, 47 

immortal spirit. Henceforth the world was 
governed from a Christianized Hellenic centre.^ 
This meant that government for the future was 
to be mingled in an ever increasing measure 
with metaphysics ; that theory and unreality, 
the dream, the vision, the golden hope, all the 
fleeting elements of life, were to have a large 
share in the administration of things civil and 
ecclesiastical. Government was henceforth — 

" Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." 

1 "The Greek characteristics of the empire under Justinian are 
calculated to suggest vividly the process of ebb and flow which is 
always going on in the course of history. Just ten centuries be- 
fore Greek Athens was the bright centre of European civilization. 
Then the torch was passed westward from the cities of Hellenism, 
where it had burned for a while, to shine in Latin Rome. Soon 
the rivers of the world, to adopt an expression of Juvenal, poured 
into the Tiber. Once more the brand changed hands ; it was trans- 
mitted from the temple of Capitoline Jupiter, once more eastward, 
to a city of the Greek world — a world, however, which now dis- 
dained the impious name ' Hellenic ' and was called ' Romaic. ' 
By the shores of the Bosphorus, on the acropolis of Grseco-Roman 
Constantinople, the light of civilization lived pale but steady for 
many hundred years — longer than it had shone by the Ilissus, 
longer than it had gleamed by the Nile or the Orontes, longer than 
it had blazed by the Tiber, and the Church of St. Sophia was the 
visible symbol of as great a historical idea as those which the Par- 
thenon and the Temple of Jupiter had represented, the idea of Euro- 
pean Christendom. The empire, at once Greek and Roman, the 
ultimate results to which ancient history, with Greek history and 
Roman, had been leading up, was for nine centuries to be the bul- 
wark of Europe against Asia, and to render possible the growth of 
the nascent civilization of the Teutonic nations of the West by pre- 
serving the heritage of the old world." — Bury, "History of the 
Lat^r Roman Empire," Vol. II., p. 39. 



48 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 

Cato, it is said, chased the Greek philosophers 
from Rome. They one day momited the throne 
in their worst shape, the shape of the sophist, in 
the person of Marcus Aurelius ; but, indeed, they 
had no proper place in Eome, where government 
has always tended to keep its head clear and 
calm, with eyes fixed on the actual interest, the 
average practical and attainable. Not so in the 
Greek Orient. With the triumph of the Chris- 
tian rehgion the gods of Hellas fell from their 
rotten pedestals. But they were never the gov- 
erning element, the principe generateur of the 
Greek life. That was the individual reflective 
mind, eternally busy with the reasons of things, 
seeking the why and the how and the wherefore, 
not for any definite purpose, but because this 
restless research was its life, its delight ; because 
at bottom it was highly idealistic and despised 
the outer and visible world as an immense phe- 
nomenon, a proper and commensurate subject for 
the ruinous acidity of its criticism. 

It is the metaphysical trend and spirit of 
these opmiosissimi homines of Greece which be- 
gat the great heresies of Arius, Macedonius, Nes- 
torius, and Eutyches — all Greeks. They even 
partially conquered in their defeat, for they com- 
pelled, to some extent, a philosophical refutation 



i 



JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT, 49 

of their own vagaries; they helped Plato, and 
later Aristotle, to their high seats in Christian 
schools. With sure instinct the earliest Chris- 
tian historians of heresies set down among them 
certain phases of Greek philosophy. " Quid 
Academice et EcdesicB ! " cries Tertullian in his 
book on Prescription, as though he smelled the 
battle from afar. 

In the intense passion of the Arian and chris- 
tological discussions the highest Greek gift, 
metaphysics, and the finest Greek training, dia- 
lectics, came to the front. In every city of the 
Greek world the most abstruse and fine-drawn 
reasoning was indulged in habitually by all 
classes. The heresy of Arius had surely its ob- 
scure origin among those third-century philoso- 
phers of Antioch who gave to that school its 
grammatico-literal and rationalizing trend. He 
appeared at Nicaea in the company of pagan 
philosophers, and when defeated carried his 
cause at once before the sailors and millers 
and wandering pedlers along the sea front at 
Alexandria. And for two centuries the shop- 
keepers and shoemakers of Constantinople and 
Alexandria would rather chop logic than attend 
to their customers. For the victories of the 
mind the burdens of the State were neglected or 



50 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 

forgotten, or rather a metaphysical habit of 
thought was carried into the council chamber, 
to prevail therein very often to the detriment of 
the commonwealth. The great officers of the 
State were too often doubled with theologians. 
The emperor himself took on gradually the 
character of an apostolic power, with God-given 
authority to impose himself upon the churches, 
formulate creeds, decide the knottiest points of 
divinity, make and unmake bishops great and 
small, and generally to become, in all things, a 
visible providence of God on earth .^ This is 
what the Eastern world acquired by losing its 
Roman emperors and gaining a succession im- 
bued with the spirit of Hellenic thought, and 
accustomed to the exercise of despotic power in 
a city that had no old and stormy republican tra- 
ditions, being no more than the high golden seat 
of imperial authority from its foundation. Were 
it not for the magnificent resistance of Old Rome 
in her Leos and her Gregorys, the Oriental bish- 
ops would have allowed the cause of Christianity 
to become identified with the Caesaro-papism of 
the emperors. 

If we add to the loss or absence of desirable 

1 Cf. Rambaud, " L'Empereur Byzantin,'* Bevue des Deux 
Mondes (1891). 



JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT, 51 

Roman qualities on the part of these great gov- 
ernors of imperial society, and the acquisition of 
undesirable Greek qualities, certain influences of 
the Orient, we shall, perhaps, better understand 
the situation in which Justinian found himself. 
It was noted very early that in contact with the 
Orient the extremely supple and impressionable 
Greek genius suffered morally. It lost its old 
Dorian or Argive independence, and, stooping to 
conquer, took on the outward marks of servitude 
while dwelling internally in its own free illimit- 
able world of opinion and criticism. Long wars, 
commerce, travel, especially prolonged sojourns 
in corrupting Persia, had habituated the Eastern 
Greeks to political absolutism. Since Alexander 
the habits of servile subjection of their own con- 
quered populations of Syria and Egypt were in- 
fluential in this direction. The Roman emperors 
from Diocletian on were themselves caught by 
the externals of the Great King's court, and 
seem to have transferred much of its ceremonial 
to their own. The presence in Constantinople 
of a great multitude of miscellaneous Orientals 
and the exaggeration of style and rhetoric pecul- 
iar to this as to all other times of decadence, 
added strength to this current servilism. 



52 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 

II. 

The great problem that faced Justinian on his 
accession was the very character and limits of the 
Roman State for the future. Were the en- 
croachments of one hundred years, the extinction 
of the Imperium in the West, to be finally con- 
doned to those victorious Germans who in the 
last century had absorbed the political control of 
Italy, Gaul, Africa, Spain, Sicily ? Or should an 
effort be made to reestablish again an orhis ter- 
rarum^ the ancient world-wide cycle of imperial 
authority ? Should Carthage, Milan, Havenna, 
Trier, Rome itself, be forever renounced; or must 
one last struggle be made to win back the cra- 
dle of the empire and the scene of its first con- 
quests ? Every possible argument pointed in an 
affirmative sense — the raison d'etat, the relig- 
ious considerations and influences, the demands 
of commerce and industry, the incredibly strong 
passion of sentiment evoked by the memories 
and glory of Old Rome. In the heart of Justin- 
ian burned the feelings of a Caesar and a Cru- 
sader, a great trader and carrier of the Royal 
City, and a Hellene scandal-stricken at the over- 
flow of barbarism and '' Medism " that was foul- 
ing all the fair and sweet uses of life. In the 



JUSTINIAN THE GEE AT. 53 

person of Belisarius lie found a worthy general, 
one of the most intelligent and resourceful men 
who ever led troops into action. He found also 
for Belisarius a secretary, Procopius, who has 
left us a brilliant record of the great campaigns 
by which the ancient lands of the empire were 
won back. For twenty-five years the world of 
the Mediterranean resounded with the din of 
universal war. Around the whole periphery 
of empire went on the work of preparation, a- 
thousand phases of mortal conflict, a thousand 
sieges, truces, and bloody battles. Belisarius 
broke the short-lived and fanatic Vandal power 
in 531, and Carthage, so dearly bought with 
Roman blood, was again a Roman city. Jus- 
tinian lived to see the heroic resistance of the 
Ostrogoths made vain, after the death of their 
noble king, by the total subjugation of Italy 
and its reincorporation with the empire. In 
the meantime the great corn-granary of the em- 
pire, Sicily, was won back, and the constant fear 
of famine that hung over Constantinople and 
the army disappeared. Scarcely had he relief 
in Africa or Italy when the emperor moved his 
troops to the plains of Mesopotamia or even to 
the rocky fastnesses of Colchis, the modern 
Georgia, chastening at once the proud Mede and 



A 



54 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 

the fierce shepherds of those inaccessible hills. 
With the exception of the Persian campaigns, 
these wars ended successfully for the Koman 
State. One last outpouring of Teutons — the 
long advancing Lombards — wrenched away 
Northern Italy from the immediate successor of 
Justinian and interposed a hopeless barrier 
against any attempts to reconquer Austria, Switz- 
erland, and Bavaria. But Central and Southern 
Italy were saved. A praetorian prefect was set 
over Northern Africa ; Sardinia and Corsica were 
once more integrant portions of the great Medi- 
terranean State. A praetor again governed in 
Sicily as in the days of Cicero. From the inac- 
cessible marshes of Ravenna an exarch or patri- 
cian ruled the remnants of the Roman name in 
the original home of that race. Even in Spain 
Justinian recovered a footing, and several cities 
of the coast recognized again the authority that 
had so long civilized the Iberian peninsula. 

Doubtless it was owing to the incredible exi- 
gencies of the Persian wars that Central Eu- 
rope swept finally out of the immediate vision 
of the emperor. The men, ships, moneys, and 
efforts of all kinds that it took to carry on these 
long and costly and unsatisfactory campaigns 
against the Persian, could well have availed to 



JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 55 

reunite the lost lands of the West and to make 
the Rhine and the Danube again Roman rivers. 
The interest in the island of Britain grew so 
faint that it appears in Procopius only as the 
home of innumerable -spirits, a vast cemetery of 
ghosts ferried over nightly from Gaul by terrified 
mariners who are chosen in turn and compelled 
by supernatural force.^ 

The Frank went on absorbing at his leisure 
the Rhineland, Switzerland, Bavaria, Southern 
Gaul, and threatened to sweep Spain and North- 
ern Italy into his State.^ Indeed, out of the 
fragments that escaped Justinian and Belisarius, 
the greatest of the Frankish race, the mighty 
Karl, would one day resurrect the Roman Em- 
pire in the West. If Justinian did not recover 
all the Western Empire, at least he brought to 
an end the Germanic invasions by exterminating 
Vandal and Ostrogoth and reestablishing in the 
West some formal and visible image of the old 
Roman power and charm. Henceforth Thuringi- 

1 Nothing could illustrate more forcibly the thoroughness of the 
decadence of the old Roman power in the West than the presence 
in Procopius of this curious survival of old Druidic lore. Cf. 
Edouard Schurd, " Les Grandes Ldgendes de France " (Paris, 1892), 
p. 154. 

2 Gasquet, " L'Empire Byzantin et la Monarchic franque " 
(Paris, 1888) ; Lecoy de la Marche, "La Fondation de la France 
au V. et VI. si^cles " (Paris, 1893). 



56 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, 

ans, Burgundians, Alemans, Yisigoths, Suevi, 
Alans, the whole Golden Horde of tribes that 
first broke down the bounds of the empire, tend 
to disappear, submerged in the growing Frank- 
ish unity. The one unfortunate race that came 
last — the Lombards — was destined to be utterly 
broken up between the three great Western 
powers of the two succeeding centuries, the chil- 
dren of Pepin Heristal, the Byzantine exarchs of 
Italy, and the bishops of Rome. Could Justin- 
ian have kept the line of the Danube free and 
secure, the course of mediaeval history would 
surely have been changed. This was the origi- 
nal weak spot of the empire, and had always 
been recognized as such. Trajan tried to Roman- 
ize the lands just across it — the ancient Dacia 
— but his successor, Marcus Aurelius, had to 
withdraw. An inexhaustible world of miscella- 
neous barbarians — an officina gentium — ^was at 
the back of every frequent rebellion, and their 
warriors were like the leaves of the summer 
forest. Here, too, was the fateful margin of 
empire, along which broke eventually the last 
surges of every profound social or economic 
disturbance of the far Orient, flinging across 
the great river in wild disorder Hun and Slav 
and Avar and Gepid and Bulgar. The first 



JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 57 

encroacliments on Roman life and security cul- 
minated, after a century of warfare, in the ever 
memorable campaigns and retreats of Attila. 
And when the empire of the mighty Hun fell 
apart at his death, the Germans, Slavs, Bulgars, 
and other non-Hunnic tribes whom he had 
governed from his Hungarian village, took up 
each its own bandit life and divided with the 
Hunnic tribes the wild joys of annual incursions 
into those distracted provinces that are now the 
modern kingdoms of the Balkans and Greece, 
but were then Illyricum, Moesia, Thrace, Thes- 
saly, Macedonia, Epirus. The Avars and the 
Huns, remnants perhaps of the horde of Attila, 
were the most dreaded in the time of Justinian. 
But they only alternated with the Slavs, to 
whom they gave way within a century, so end- 
less was the supply of this new family of bar- 
barism. These latter were tall, strongs blond, 
with ruddy hair, living in rude hovels and on 
the coarsest grain, fiercely intolerant of any rule 
but that of the father of the family, jealous and 
avaricious, faithless like all barbarians, yet child- 
like in their admiration for power and grandeur. 
They harassed yearly the whole immense pen- 
insula of the Balkans. They climbed its peaks, 
threaded its valleys, swam its rivers, a visitation 



58 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 

of imman locusts. The regular armies of Jus- 
tinian were of no avail, for these multitudes 
fought only in ambuscade, a style of warfare 
peculiarly fitting to the Balkans, which are like 
the " Bad Lands " of Dakota on an immense 
scale. They shot poisoned arrows at the Romans 
from invisible perches, and at close quarters 
were dread opponents by reason of their short 
and heavy battle-axes. It was in vain that line 
within line of fortifications were built, that in 
isolated spots the watch-towers and forts were 
multiplied and perfected, that every ford and 
pass and cross-road had its sentry boxes and 
castles. The enemy had been filtering in from 
the time of Constantine/ and was already no 
small element of the native population. So, as 
German had called to German across the Rhine, 
Slav called to Slav across the Danube; the Ro- 
mans were caught between the hammer and the 
anvil, between the barbarian within and his 
brother from without. Nevertheless, it was not 
without a struggle that filled four centuries more 
that Constantinople let go her mountain bul- 
wark. Every river ran red, and every hillside 

1 O. Seeck, " Geschichte des Untergangs der antiken Welt," 
(Berlin, 1897), Vol. I., Part II., c. 6 j "Die Barbaren im Keich," 
pp. 391-548. 



JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT, 59 

was drenched with blood, in that memorable 
contest, in which she sometunes saw from the 
walls of the Eoyal City the plains of Thrace 
one smoking ruin, and again all but cut off, 
root and branch, her Slavonic and Bulgarian 
enemies.^ 

Doubtless the heart of Justinian was sore 
pressed at his impotency against the swarming 
Slavs and Avars. He loved his Illyrian home, 
and built on the site of his native village a city, 
Justiniana Prima (near Sophia), which he fondly 
hoped would be a new Byzantium in the Bal- 
kans. With a foreconscious eye he made it a 
bishopric, even a patriarchate, and ordered for 
it honors second only to those of the most 
ancient sees of the Christian world. This act 
was productive of grave consequences in later 
times that fall beyond our present ken.^ 

The long wars of Justinian with Persia were 
otherwise important. Here it was a death strug- 

1 The influence of Constantinople in the later Slavonic world is 
incontestable. Besides the "Chronicle of Nestor" (French trans- 
lation by L. Leger, Paris, 1884), cf. Gaster, " Grseco-Sclavonic " 
(London, 1877); Rambaud, "La Russie Epique" (Paris, 1876); 
Krek, "Einleitung in die Slavische Literatur-geschichte " (Graz, 
1877), pp. 451-473 ; and the pro-Byzantine work of Lamansky (in 
Russian), " On the Historical Study of the Graeco-Sclavonic World " 
(St. Petersburg, 1871). 

2 Puchesne, "Les %lises S^par^es" (Paris, 1897). 



60 JUSTINIAN THE GEE AT. 

gle between Persia striving to reach, the sea and 
Constantinople struggling to keep her back. 
These wars lasted more or less continuously 
from 528 to 562, and sometimes coincided with 
the greatest expeditions in the West. From 
time to time a peace was concluded or a truce — 
the peaces were really only truces. The usual 
result was the payment of a heavy tribute on 
the part of the emperor, amounting at times to 
as much as a million dollars, not to speak of the 
numerous sums paid by the cities of Mesopotamia 
and Syria, and the incalculable treasures carried 
off in each of these campaigns. If the Persian 
resented new fortifications in the vicinity of the 
Euphrates, war was declared. If the Saracen 
sheiks who stood with the Romans fell into a 
dispute with their brethren who served Persia 
over a desert sheepwalk, it was settled by a 
long war between the Romans and the Persians. 
Endless sieges of fortified cities, heavy ransoms 
from pillage and burning, extraordinary single 
combats, marching and countermarching across 
Syria and Mesopotamia, fill the pages of the 
historians. The local Jews and Samaritans, yet 
numerous and powerful, were no small source 
of weakness to the Romans. So, too, were the 
ugly heresies of the Monophysites and Nestori- 



JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 61 

ans, with all the hatreds and heartburnings they 
occasioned against Constantinople, the protec- 
tress of the orthodox faith of Chalcedon, a 
general council almost universally misunder- 
stood, and equally hated in Syria and Egypt. 
In 532, for example, Justinian purchased peace 
for eleven thousand Roman pounds of gold 
(about two and a half millions of dollars). He 
was then in the throes of the Vandal war in Af- 
rica and on the point of the expeditions against 
the Moors and to recover Sicily. When Belisa- 
rius was in the very heart of the Gothic war in 
Italy, Chosroes again broke the peace, solicited 
by Witigis, the head of the Gothic forces, and 
joined by many dissatisfied Armenians, who con- 
sidered themselves oppressed by the Romans — 
perhaps, too, embittered by the persecution 
directed against the Monophysites. 

In their own way these wars are of value for 
the history of military engineering. Great and 
ancient cities fall before the engineers of Persia. 
Antioch, the Queen of the East, for the second 
time saw a Persian king within her walls. 
Chosroes even reached the shores of the Medi- 
terranean, gazed on the great Midland Sea, 
bathed in its blue waters, and on its shores 
offered to the sun the sacrifice of a fire-worship- 



62 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 

per. He had strong hopes of reaching and con- 
quering Jerusalem and of bri^:ging all Syria 
under his yoke, but desisted therefrom. Inter- 
nal disorders and the plague seem to have held 
him back. The last phase of these Persian wars 
was unrolled at the extremity of the Black Sea, 
among the Lazi, in old Greek Colchis, the land 
of the Golden Fleece, now Mingrelia and Geor- 
gia. The people were Christians and under an 
uncertain Roman protectorate. But they abut- 
ted on an unruly portion of the Persian Empire, 
and so were a thorn in the side of Chosroes. 
Moreover, he had long desired a footing on the 
Black Sea, whence he could create a navy that 
would place Constantinople at his mercy and 
permit him to come into easy contact with those 
Huns and Slavs and Avars who, from the 
mouths of the Danube and the plains of Bes- 
sarabia and Southern Russia, were harassing the 
Royal City. Hence the great importance of the 
long and weary struggle for the wild and barren 
hills of the Caucasian seashore. They were 
doubly important, because these narrow passes 
could keep back or let in the trans-Caucasian 
Scythians and create a new source of ills for a 
State groaning already under a complication 
of them. In the end the Persian was shut out, 



JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT. 63 

chiefly because the population was Christian and 
uns3niipathetic to him, but not without a war of 
seven years' duration, filled with romantic epi- 
sodes and revealing at once all the weaknesses 
and also the strong points of the Roman mili- 
tary system. The victory, as usual, cost a nota- 
ble sum of money. Justinian agreed to pay 
about one hundred thousand • dollars yearly for 
fifty years, of which nearly a million dollars had 
to be paid down at once. Nevertheless, he kept 
the Persians from becoming a naval power and 
from undertaking the anti-Christian propaganda 
that a century later fell to the yet despised 
Arabs and Saracens who were serving in both 
armies, unconscious that on the great dial of 
time their hour was drawing nigh. 

For the thirty-eight and odd years of his reign 
the emperor was never free from care as to the 
existence and limits of the State. It was no 
ordinary merit to have provided for the defence 
of the common weal in all that time, to have 
recovered a great part of what his predecessors 
had lost, to have restored the prestige of the 
empire over against Frank and Ostrogoth, to 
have kept Persia in her ancient limits, and to 
have saved the Royal City from the fate of Old 
Rome, which had fallen before the first on- 



64 JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT. 

slaught of Alaric. No doubt he had able gen- 
erals — Belisarius, Bessas, John the Armenian, 
Dagisthseus, Wilgang, and others. It was an 
age of mechanical inventions and engineering 
skill, the result of good studies among the 
ancient books and also of new needs and experi- 
ences.^ The peculiar character of the barbarian 
wars and the multitude of old populous cities 
through the Roman 'Orient gave opportunity 
for the development of fortifications. By this 
means chiefly, it would seem, the emperor hoped 
to withstand the attacks of his enemies. 



III. 

The armies of Justinian were recruited on 
pretty much the same principle as those of 
his predecessors. Since Diocletian and Constan- 
tine, conquered barbarians had become the mer- 
cenaries of the empire and received regularly, 
as wages, the gold which they had formerly 

1 In the " Varise" of Cassiodorus are found many curious con- 
temporary traces of the survival of the ancient skill in engineering 
and architecture. Cf. the formula (VII. 6) for the appointment 
of a Count of the Aqueducts, and (VII. 15) for the appointment 
of an "Architectus operum publicorum." "Let him consult the 
works of the ancients, but he vv'ill find more in this city [Rome] 
than in his books." The "Letters of Cassiodorus" are partially 
translated by Thomas Hodgkin (London, 1886). 



JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT. 65 

extorted by the irregular and uncertain methods 
of invasion and plunder. Isauria in all its in- 
accessible strongholds became a pepiniere of 
soldiers for the empire just as soon as it had 
been demonstrated to these untameable hill-folk 
that Constantinople would no longer tolerate 
their impudent independence. The Catholic 
" Little Goths " of Thrace were good for many 
a recruit. 

The disbanded and chiefless Heruli, ousted 
from Italy by Theodoric^ were at the disposition 
of the emperor. Sometimes the barbarians 
came in as faderati or as coloni, half soldiers, 
half farmers. Sometimes they rose to the high- 
est offices by bravery and intelligence, like a 
Dagisthaeus, a John, a Wilgang, a Guiscard, five 
hundred years ahead of that other Guiscard, who 
was to beard in Constantinople itself, the suc- 
cessor of Justinian. It was a heyday for all the 
barbarian adventurers of the world. Never since 
the palmy days of Crassus and Caesar, of Antony 
and Germanicus, was there war at once so griev- 
ous and widespread, so varied in its fields of battle, 
and claiming so much endurance, ingenuity, and 
industry. Then was in demand all that the art 
of sieges had gained since the Homeric pirates 
sat down before some lone Greek trader on his 



66 JUSTINIAN THE GEE AT, 

isolated perch in the ^gean. If Shakespeare's 
Welsh captain could read of the famous sieges 
of Daras and Edessa, his soul would go up in 
flame for joy at these wars carried on with all 
the science of a dozen Caesars. Trench and 
counter-trench, wall and parapet, ditch and mine, 
tower and rampart, battering ram and beam and 
wedge — a hundred industries were kept going 
to lay low the huge fortifications of monolith 
and baked brick that dotted the land of Eastern 
Syria and Mesopotamia. Indeed, it was by his 
enormous system of fortifications that the great 
emperor assured the restored peace of his 
domains. 

It is true, as Montesquieu has said, that 
" France was never so weak as when every vil- 
lage was fortified." Yet under the circum- 
stances this was the only immediate remedy 
against countless enemies from without and 
within, ceaselessly plotting the ruia of the ven- 
erable old State. The best national defences 
are those which we can most easily set up and 
most strongly defend, not what the theorist or 
philosopher of war can suggest. From Belgrade 
to the Black Sea, from the *Save to the Dan- 
ube, citadels with garrisons and colonies were lo- 
cated and provided with weapons of defence and 



JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT. 67 

attack. In Greece, Macedonia, Thrace, Thessaly, 
over six hundred forts were established for 
observation and resistance. Many of them, 
perhaps, were such watch-towers and lonely bar- 
racks as we yet see in the Roman Campagna, 
whither the shepherd and his herd could turn 
for a momentary refuge from marauders. 

All the scum of the northeastern world was 
floating loosely over the plains of Southern 
Russia, faintly held back by the Greek cities of 
the Crimea. The peninsula of Greece was par- 
ticularly open ; the unwarlike character of its 
thin population was patent since Alaric had 
burned and pillaged his way across it in all 
directions early in the fifth century. Since then 
its woes are best described by dropping a black 
pall across the annals of one hundred years. 

" The centre of earth's noblest ring " 

was a howling desert, save for a few cities in 
which, perhaps, the old Greek blood was propa- 
gated, and some spark of the philosophic mind 
nursed against a better day.^ The pass of 

1 "If we go to look in modern Greece for pure and unmixed 
Hellenes, untainted by any drop of barbarian blood, that we as- 
suredly shall not find. . . . The Greek nation, in short, has, like 
all other nations, been affected, and largely affected, by the law of 
adoption. . . . The Sclavonic occupation of a large part of Greece 
in the eighth and ninth centuries is an undoubted fact, and the 



68 JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT, 

Thermopylse was again fortified and garrisoned. 
The Isthmus of Corinth was strengthened as a 
buffer for the wild Peloponnesus, half-heathen as 
it still was in its remotest valleys and hillsides. 
The long wall of Thrace that protected the 
kitchen-garden suburbs of Constantinople was 
strengthened — not so well, however, that irregu- 
lar bands of Huns, Avars, and Slavs did not reg- 
ularly break through and insult the holy majesty 
of the empire with their barbarian taunts, that 
mingled with the flames of costly churches and 
municipal buildings and with the cries of the 
dying and the outraged. As we peruse these 
annals it is hard to keep back a tear and a 
shudder, and we comprehend the preternatural 
gravity that hangs about every coin and effigy 
of Justinian. To him it must have seemed as if 
the original sanctity of order, the rock basis of 
society, were tottering to its fall. Alas! he 
could not see that those flames which lit up the 
Propontis and the Isles of the Princes,^ which 
fell across the site of ancient Troy and the origi- 
nal homes of Dorian and Ionian merchants, were 
not the awful illumination of a " Night of the 

Sclavonic element in the population of Peloponnesus may he traced 
down to the time of the Ottoman conquest. " — Ereeman, "Medi- 
aeval and Modern Greece," op. cit., pp. 340-341. 

1 Schlumberger, "Les lies des Princes" (Paris, 1884). 



JUSTINIAN THE GEE AT. 69 

Gods/' but the dawn of our modern society.^ 
In such pangs and throes does social man usually 
reach his highest place, his highest calling on 
this sad footstool of earth ! 

Though the quasi-extermination of Isauria by 

1 " The first chief who fenced in the Palatine with a wall did not 
dream that his hill-fortress would become the head of the world. 
He did not dream that it would become the head of Italy or even 
of Latium. But the prince who fenced in the New Rome, the 
prince who bade Byzantium grow into Constantinople, did design 
that his younger Rome should fulfil the mission that had passed 
away from the elder Rome. He designed that it should fulfil it 
more thoroughly tha» Milan or Trier or Mkomedia could fulfil it. 
And his will has been carried out. He called into being a city 
which, while other cities have risen and fallen, has for fifteen hun- 
dred years, in whatever hands, remained the seat of imperial rule ; 
a city which, as long as Europe and Asia, as long as sea and land 
keep their places, must remain the seat of imperial rule. The 
other capitals of Europe seem by her side things of yesterday, 
creations of accident. Some chance a few centuries back made 
them seats of government till some other chance may cease to make 
them seats of government. But the city of Constantine abides 
and must abide. Over and over again has the possession of that 
city prolonged the duration of powers which must otherwise have 
crumbled away. In the hands of Roman, Frank, Greek, and 
Turk her imperial mission has never left her. The eternity of the 
elder Rome is an eternity of moral infiuence ; the eternity of the 
younger Rome is the eternity of a city and fortress fixed on a spot 
which nature itself had destined to be the seat of the empire of two 
worlds." — Freeman, "The Byzantine Empire" in "Historical Es- 
says," Vol. III., series 1892, p. 255. On the city of Constantinople, 
besides the classic description of Hammer in his " Geschichte der 
Osmanen," there are for modern times the books of De Amicis, 
Grosvenor, and Hutton ; for the Middle Ages the "Esquisse topo- 
graphique" of Dr. Mordtmann (Lille, 1892) ; for the early Middle 
Ages " Constantinopolis Christiana" (1729, fol.), and Riant, "Ex- 
uviae Sacrse Christianse" (Geneve, 1877, 2 vols.). 



70 JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT, 

Anastasius gave peace on the mainland of Asia 
Minor, Justinian was obliged to protect that 
vast heart of the empire, with all its superim- 
posed and ancient civilizations, by great walls 
towered and flanked at intervals from the Crimea 
to Trebizond on the Persian frontier, a stretch 
of ^YQ hundred miles. The Iberian and Caspian 
gates, those narrow sea margins and mountain 
throats that control the entry to the Black Sea 
from the steep ranges of Caucasus, had also to 
be fortified, or, rather, the strong hand of the 
emperor must compel the rude mountain chiefs 
to render to him as well as to themselves this 
necessary duty. The very sources of the Eu- 
phrates, forever a dark and bloody line of battle, 
had to be secured against the feudal satraps of 
the Great King. In the Mesopotamian plain 
Amida, Constantine, Nisibis, holy Edessa, must 
rise up, clad with impregnable armor and filled 
with warlike men. Restless, unsympathetic, 
proud, discontented, abused Armenia — the tor- 
ture of Eome since the days of Mark Antony 
and still the plague of statesmen — must be 
fastened once more, however unwillingly, to the 
body of the Eoman State. 

In the whole Orient rose up one hope of vic- 
tory, one sure refuge, the great Gibraltar of 



JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, 71 

Daras. One hundred years had Eome toiled 
at that barrier against Persia. Only the inces- 
sant wars in Italy and the Mediterranean pre- 
vented Justinian from making it the capital of 
Eoman power in the Orient. As it was^ Daras 
was the chief thorn in the side of Persia, a living 
monumental insult pushed far into the lands 
that the Great King looked on as his hereditary 
domain, and an encouragement to all his own 
rebels as well as a promise to the thousands of 
unattached Saracens, the Bedouins of those 
grassy deserts on whose surface we now look 
in vain for traces of the greatest fortress that 
Greek genius ever constructed. 

Egypt, too, the land of the wheat-bearing and 
gold-producing Nile, needed the assurance of 
fortifications against the hordes of Ethiopia and 
Nubia, and inner unexplored Africa, against the 
tribes of the Soudan, who, from time imme- 
morial, under many names, waged war against 
civilization on its oldest, richest, and narrowest 
line of development. 

Justinian never forgot the arts of diplomacy 
in the midst of all these warlike cares. He was 
always willing to pacify by tribute the various 
broken bands of Huns. This had been always 
one line of imperial policy, even in the palmy 



72 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 

days of a Theodosius the Great. Much was 
always hoped from the internal discords of the 
barbarians, who often dissipated their strength 
in orgies and self-indulgence. One tribe was 
played olff against the other by arousing avarice. 
The Goths, for instance, hated the Franks and 
the Alemans, so they were willing to exter- 
minate seventy-five thousand of the latter, who 
might have helped them to cast out thoroughly 
the Roman power. The emperor encouraged 
the King of Abyssinia against the King of the 
Homerites in Southern Arabia, and made thereby 
a useful Christian friend, while he broke up an 
anti-Christian Jewish power. He took in as a 
body of auxiliary troops the Heruli of Italy, so 
brutal and stupid that nobody would have them 
fts neighbors. He gave the Crimea to three 
thousand shepherd Goths and cultivated the 
principal men among the Tzani, the Armenians, 
the Lazi of Colchis. Chosroes could say in 539 
that soon the whole world would not contain 
Justinian, so happy seemed his fortunes about 
that date. Yet he could also taste the cup of 
despair, for in 558 he was obliged to witness a 
small body of wild Huns come up to the very 
gates of the Royal City, an advance guard of 
other hordes that were pillaging Thrace and 



JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 73 

Greece. The aged Belisarius could find only 
three hundred reliable soldiers in a city of one 
million inhabitants ; yet with them he scattered 
these Huns and saved the city. 

The old historian Agathias tells us that there 
should then have been in the army six hundred 
and fifty-five thousand fighting men, but it had 
dwindled down to one hundred and fifty thou- 
sand. " And of these some were in Italy, others 
in Africa, others in Spain, others in Colchis, 
others at Alexandria and in the Thebaid, a few 
on the Persian frontier." 

It is to this decay of the army, caused perhaps 
by jealousy of its immortal leader and by female 
intrigue, that the same judicious historian, a 
contemporary and a man of culture, attributes 
the growing ills of the Eoman State. His 
thoughtful phrase is worth listening to ; soon 
this current of philosophic observation will cease, 
and commonplace chronicling take its place in 
the seventh and eighth centuries of the Byzan- 
tine Empire. 

"When the emperor conquered all Italy and Lybia and 
waged successfully those mighty wars, and of the princes who 
reigned at Constantinople was the first to show himself an abso- 
lute sovereign in fact as well as in name — after these things 
had been acquired by him in his youth and vigor, and when he 
entered on the last stages of life, he seemed to be weary of 



74 JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT, 

labors, and preferred to create discord among his foes or to 
mollify thera with gifts, and so keep off their hostilities, instead 
of trusting his own forces and shrinking from no danger. He 
consequently allowed the troops to decline, because he expected 
that he would not require their services. And those who were 
second in authority to himself, on whom it was incumbent to 
collect the taxes and supply the army with necessary provi- 
sions, were affected with the same indifference and either openly 
kept back the rations altogether or paid them long after they 
were due ; and when the debt was paid at last, persons skilled 
in the rascally science of arithmetic demanded back from the 
soldiers what had been given them. It was their privilege to 
bring various charges against the soldiers and deprive them of 
theu' food. Thus the army was neglected and the soldiers, 
pressed by hunger, left their profession to embrace other modes 
of life." 

IV. 

The very religious mind of Justinian could not 
but be much concerned with the social conditions 
and problems of his time. His legislation bears 
the impress of this preoccupation — it is highly 
moral throughout, and constantly seeks a con- 
cord on ethical and religious principles. Thus, 
to go through his code haphazard, we find him 
concerned about the building of churches and 
their good order and tranquillity. He is said 
to have built twenty-five in Constantinople alone, 
and to have chosen for them the most favorable 
sites in public squares, by the sea, in groves, on 
eminences where often great engineering skill 
was demanded. The rarest woods and the 



JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, 75 

costliest marbles were employed, and multitudes 
of laborers given the means of life. They were 
usually paid every evening with fresh-coined 
money as a tribute to religion. He built and 
endowed many nunneries, hospitals, and mon- 
asteries, notably in the Holy Land, where he 
also provided wells and stations for pilgrims. 
Bridges, aqueducts, baths, theatres, went up con- 
stantly ; for building he was a second Hadrian. 
And all this had a social side — the employment 
of vast numbers of men, the encouragement of 
the fine arts, great and little. He is concerned 
about institutions of charity of every kind, and 
in their interest makes his own the old and 
favorable laws of his predecessors. In his day 
every sorrow was relieved in Constantinople. 
The aged, the crippled, the blind, the helpless, 
the orphans, the poor, had each their own peculiar 
shelter, managed by thousands of good men and 
women who devoted themselves gratuitously 
to these tasks.^ The slave and the debtor had 
their rights of asylum acknowledged in the 

1 Bulteau, "Essai de I'histoire monastique de I'Orient" (Paris, 
1680). The late work of the Abb6 Morin, "Les Moines de Con- 
stantinople" (Paris, 1897), and the study of Dom Besse, very rich 
in details, "Les Moines d' Orient anterieurs an Concile de Chalet 
doine" (Paris, 1900), permit the student to obtain a complete con- 
spectus of the monastic history of the Orient. 



76 JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT. 

churches and regulated according to the de- 
mands of proper police order. The right of 
freeing the slaves was recognized especially in 
bishops and priests ; to them was given the 
power to control the ^^ defenders of the city'^ 
— a kind of popular tribunes, whose duty it 
was to supervise the proper administration of 
justice. He undertook to abolish gambling, 
claiming, logically enough, that he had the same 
right to do that as to carry on war and regu- 
late religion. Blasphemy and perjury and the 
greater social crimes and sins were visited with 
specially heavy sanctions, though we may doubt 
if they often passed beyond the written threat. 
He legislated humanely for the rescue of aban- 
doned children and for the redemption of those 
numerous captives whom the barbarians daily 
swept away from the soil of the empire. No 
female could longer be compelled to appear in 
a theatrical performance, even if she were a 
slave, even if she had signed a contract to do so, 
being a free woman. The bishop of each city 
was authorized to carry out this law. An actress 
might henceforth marry any member of society, 
even a senator. He was personally interested 
in the thousands of poor girls who came yearly 
to the Royal City, and were often the prey of 



JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, 77 

designing persons who had travelled through the 
provinces, "enticing young girls by promising 
them shoes and clothes." 

In the last century it was a custom to offset 
such creditable details by reference to the ter- 
rible pages of the " Anecdota/' or " Secret His- 
tory" of Procopius. And Gibbon has not failed 
to expend on them some of his most salacious 
rhetoric and to violate, for their sake, his usual 
stern principles of doubt and cynicism.^ Per- 

1 In a few vigorous phrases Edward Freeman has laid bare a 
structural weakness of Gibbon : " With all his [Gibbon's] wonder- 
ful power of grouping and condensation, which is nowhere more 
strongly shown than in his Byzantine chapters, with all his vivid 
description and his still more effective art of insinuation, his is cer- 
tainly not the style of writing to excite respect for the persons or 
period of which he is treating, or to draw many to a more minute 
study of them. His matchless faculty of sarcasm and depreciation 
is too constantly kept at work; he is too fond of anecdotes showing 
the weak or ludicrous side of any age or person ; he is incapable of 
enthusiastic admiration for any thing or person. Almost any his- 
tory treated in this manner would leave the contemptible side 
uppermost in the reader's imagination ; we cannot conceive Gibbon 
tracing the course of the Roman Republic with the affection of 
Arnold, or defending either democracy or oligarchy with the ardent 
championship of Grote or Mitford." — "Historical Essays" (1892), 
3d series (2d ed.), pp. 238-239. This recalls what Morison said of 
Gibbon — that "his cheek rarely flushes in enthusiasm for a good 
cause." Coleridge's well-known judgment in his ' ' Table Talk ' ' may 
be worthy of mention, viz. "that he did not remember a single philo- 
sophical attempt made throughout the work to fathom the ultimate 
causes of the decline and fall of the empire." In an otherwise 
sympathetic study Augustine Birrell has recorded an equally severe 
judgment on the historical method and principles of Gibbon : "The 
tone he thought fit to adopt toward Christianity was, quite apart 



78 JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT, 

haps I cannot do better than cite the very recent 
judgment of a special student of Byzantine 
history : — 

"The delicacy or affectation of the present 
age would refuse to admit the authority and 
example of Gibbon as a sufficient reason for 
rehearsing the licentious vagaries attributed to 
Theodora in the indecent pages of an audacious 
and libellous pamphlet. If the words and acts 
which the writer attributes to Theodora were 
drawn, as probably is the case, from real life, 
from the green rooms of Antioch or the bagnios 
of Byzantium, it can only be remarked that the 
morals of those cities in the sixth century did 
not differ very much from the morals of Paris, 
Vienna, Naples, or London at the present day." ^ 

from all particular considerations, a mistaken one. No man is big 
enough to speak slightingly of the construction his fellow men have 
put upon the Infinite. And conduct which in a philosopher is ill- 
judged is in an historian ridiculous. . . . Gibbon's love of the 
unseemly may also be deprecated. His is not the boisterous impro- 
priety which may sometimes be observed staggering across the 
pages of Mr. Carlyle, but the more offensive variety which is heard 
sniggering in the notes." — "Kes Judicatse" (New York, 1897), 
pp. 79, 80. 

1 Bury, op. cit., Vol. II., p. 61. On Procopius in general, cf . Dahn, 
*'Prokopios von Csesarea" (Berlin, 1865) ; Gutschmid, "Diebyzan- 
tinischen Historiker" in the "Grenzboten" (1863), Vol. I., p. 344 ; 
Eanke, " Weltgeschichte " (1883), Vol. IV., 2, pp. 285-312; Bury, 
" History of the Later Eoman Empire" (1889), Vol. I., pp. 355-364. 
Eanke is of opinion that the " Secret History " contains genuine 
material from the hand of Procopius, as, for instance, the adultery 



JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT, 79 

Still milder and more favorable is the judg- 
ment of Kraiise as to the morality of the city of 
Constantinople, even at a later date, when the 
first fervor of Christianity had cooled, and the 
city had suffered from the immoral contact of 
Islam and had become almost the sink of the 
Orient. From its foundation in 330 to its fall 
in 1453 Constantinople was always a Christian 
city, sometimes fiercely and violently so, never- 
theless an essentially Christian foundation. The 
social life, therefore, of the city, and the empire 
that it gave the tone to, could not but be of, a 
higher grade than the pagan life had to show, 
whether we look at the condition of woman, the 
poor, the slave, or the child, those four usual 
factors that condition the moral life of all 
ancient society. All the betterments of Chris- 
tianity were here available for the slave, and 
they were many and great. Numberless con- 
vents opened their doors to women and pro- 
claimed in them the dignity and independence 
of human nature in the only way possible in 
antiquity. The diaconal service of the number- 

of Antonina, wife of Belisarius. Only such materials have been 
interwoven and overlaid with other assertions not due originally to 
Procopius, hut to jealous and disappointed persons, especially those 
affected hy the stem conduct of Justinian in the Nik6 sedition 
(532). 



80 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 

less churclies was largely in their hands ; it was 
they who cared for the orphan and the poor and 
the aged. In the schools they conducted, the 
maidens of the city were taught to read the 
great classics of the Greek fatherland in a way 
that did not force them to blush for the first 
principles of decency. The letters of a Basil 
and a Chrysostom, the poems of a Gregory of 
Nazianzum, were written in a language scarcely 
less pure and elegant than the best masterpieces 
of Attica.^ 

The frequent sermons of renowned orators in 
the churches and the daily conversation of men 
and women in the best rank and station, par- 
ticular in language and manner as the Greeks 
always were, offered a superior culture. Though 
they had lost their rude Hberties, they had not 
lost their fine ear for verbal music, their keen 
and disputatious minds. The society of Con- 

1 Withal, mediaeval society was deeply indebted to the empire 
for the materials and traditions with which it began its career. 
Cunningham, " The Economic Debt to Ancient Kome" in " West- 
ern Civilization in its Economic Aspects" (Cambridge University 
Press, 1900), pp. 5-9; cf. also for the mediseval influence of 
Constantinople on the West, Dollinger, "Einfluss der griechischen 
Kultur auf die abendlandische Welt im Mittelalter," Akad. Vor- 
trage (Munich, 1890), Vol. L, pp. 162-186; Burkhardt, "Renais- 
sance" ; Voigt, "Die Wiederbelebung des classischen Alterthums " 
(2d ed., 1881) ; and Bikelas, " Les Grecs au Moyen Age," in "La 
Gr6ce Byzantine et Moderne" (Paris, 1893), pp. 3-88. 



JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT, 81 

stantinople was at all times famed for the ad- 
mirably bred women it could show. Pulcheria, 
Athenais, Eudoxia, were women of the most 
varied gifts, and they actually governed the gov- 
ernors of the world by the use of these gifts. 
The letters of St. John Chrysostom to the 
Deaconess Olympias, the story of his own 
mother, of the women of the great Cappadocian 
family of saints and theologians, reveal a fine 
and original culture penetrated with religion, 
but also enthusiastic for all that is holy and per- 
manently fair, worthy and sweet in life. Whence, 
indeed, could come the strong men who so long 
held the Royal City above the waves of barba- 
rism and disrupting war and internal disorder but 
from a truly great race of women ? When Con- 
stantinople was founded, a place was made for 
the consecrated virgins of the Christian Church. 
And forever after they held that place of honor 
so worthily that the tongue of slander has 
scarcely wagged against them. For over eleven 
centuries the city stood in the seething waters 
of secular iniquity, human weakness, Oriental 
depravity, Moslem immorality, and the miscella- 
neous filth and sinfulness of the corrupt East. 
Yet she never ceased to fill these religious 
houses of men and women, especially the latter, 



82 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 

and never ceased to behold in them models of 
the highest spiritual life on earth. We know 
how to praise the Theophanos, the Marias, and 
the Anna Komnenas of the Greek Middle Ages. 
But who shall say how many souls of noble 
women went their way silently along the ancient 
cloisters by the Bosphorus, wanting indeed in 
fame, but not wanting in a multitudinous rich 
service to every need of humanity ? The Greek 
sinned tragically against the duty of Christian 
unity, but he never lost the original Christian 
respect for the way of sacrifice and perfection. 



The ancient life about the Mediterranean was 
governed by principles and manners unknown or 
unappreciated by us.^ The warm sun and the 
abundant waters of inexpressibly delicate hues, 
the rich and varied vegetation, the cool and 
calming winds, render many of these lands the 
most delightful of the world. Life there has 
always been an out-of-door life ; all the higher 
forms of social amusement have been affected by 
the climate and the geography. It was so in 
Old Eome, it is so in all the lands of Italy, Spain, 

1 Lenormant, "La Grande Gr6ce" (Paris, 1881-84), 3 vols. 



JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT. 83 

and Southern France to this day. The peasant 
dances on the public square ; the strolHng player 
with his bear or his marionette sets up his tent 
near-by. The harvest festival, the church fete, 
the relics of old pagan superstitions baptized into 
harmlessness by innumerable centuries of tolera- 
tion — all these are lived out in the open air 
under a cloudless sky, amid balmy breezes laden 
with the scents of olive and vine, tig and orange, 
and the most aromatic shrubberies. As these 
ancient peoples moved up in the forms of gov- 
ernment their political life was all out of 
doors — the speaking, the voting, the mighty 
contests of eloquence. And when the Greek 
cities lost to Eome their national isonomy, they 
could still hire some famous sophist or rhetorician, 
like Dio Chrysostom, to keep up on the " agora " 
some faint echo or image of their adored old life.^ 
So it was that when Constantinople was built, 
the life of the city soon centred in its great hip- 



1 The municipal and domestic life of the Constantinople of Jus- 
tinian is illustrated somewhat freely in Marrast, "La Vie Byzan- 
tine au VI. Siecle " (Paris, 1881). For the following centuries, cf. 
Krause, "Die Byzantiner des Mittelalters " (Halle, 1869) ; Schlum- 
berger, "La Sigillographie Byzantine" (Paris, 1884). The work 
of Am^d^e Thierry on St. John Chrysostom contains admirable 
sketches of early Byzantine life, that are to be supplemented now 
by the indispensable volume of Aim^ Puech, " St. Jean Chrysos- 
tome et les Mceurs de son Si6cle " (Paris, 1890). 



84 JUSTINIAN TBE GBEAT. 

podrome. Since Homer described the races by 
the much-resounding sea, the peoples of the Med- 
iterranean have been inexplicably fond of horse 
racing, chariot and hurdle racing. If George 
Moore had lived among them, he would have 
produced a superior Esther Waters. General 
Lew Wallace has left a classic page or two 
descriptive of the races at Antioch that will per- 
haps live while our tongue is spoken. But no 
one has yet caught the spirit of that great hip- 
podrome by the Golden Horn. It came fresh 
from Old Rome, with all the prestige of imperial 
splendor and fondness. In that mighty circus 
whose ruins yet appall us at Rome an imperial 
people had ruled, had felt almost as vastly as a 
god, had raged, thundered, compelled, made to 
die and to live, had experienced an oceanic ful- 
ness of life, a glory of self-adulation such as 
might befit the highest and whitest Alp or the 
solemn depths of the Hercynian forest. And 
so, when at Constantinople the emperor sat 
bediademmed in his chosen seat, the autocrator, 
the pantocrator, the Basileus, the golden King 
of Kings, it seemed as if his were indeed an 
"eternal countenance, sacrosanct, holy, inviola- 
ble.'' In him that awful mob saw itself mir- 
rored. Each one, according to his own passion 



JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, 85 

or aspiration, saw the reach and the limit of his 
own possibihties. 

Nothing affected more profoundly the society 
of Constantinople than the hippodrome or circus. 
The great multitude of men and women con- 
nected with this "peculiar institution" were 
divided from time immemorial into factions — 
once red, white, blue, green, from the color of 
the ribbons attached to the axles of the chariot 
wheels or to the ears of the horses. These were 
the symbols borrowed from Old Eome, and 
in the time of Justinian they had dwindled to 
two, the Blues and the Greens. The sympathy of 
the million inhabitants of the city was divided 
between them, but with the inconstancy of 
the mob. In the time of the great emperor the 
Greens had become identified with opposition to 
the Council of Chalcedon, had become the Mon- 
ophysite factor of the city. They had, moreover, 
attracted the hatred of the Empress Theodora. 
The Blues were the favorites of the imperial 
family. The contentions of both were endless 
and very dangerous. They held open and con- 
temptuous discourse with the emperor during 
the races, and clamored wildly for justice on 
their respective enemies. The stormiest scenes 
of the Pnyx, the fiercest contentions in the 



86 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 

forum, were child's play to the rocking passions 
of the great mob of Bines and Greens on some 
high day of festival. These colors eventually 
became the symbols of all discontent and rebel- 
lion. In 532 their violence reached its height 
in the sedition of Nik^, whereby thirty thousand 
souls perished in the circus and on the streets, 
and a great and splendid part of the city was 
consumed by flames, including the great Church 
of the Heavenly Wisdom, or St. Sophia. Per- 
haps this uprising was the end of the genuine 
city life of the ancients, some remnants of whose 
turbulent freedom had always lived on in Old 
Rome and then in Constantinople. With the 
awful butchery of those days the aristocracy of 
the city was broken under the iron heel of the 
cold-faced man who dwelt in the Brazen Palace. 
Neither priest nor noble ever again wielded the 
power they once held before this event, which 
may in some sense be said to mark the true be- 
ginning of Byzantine imperialism, being itself 
the last symbolic act of popular freedom. It is 
significant that the last vestiges of the free po- 
litical life of Hellas were quenched in the city 
of Byzas by thousands of ugly and brutal Heruli 
whom a lucky Slav had attached to himself as 
so many Great Danes or Molossi ! 



JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT, 87 

The fiscal policy of Justinian has been criti- 
cised as the weakest point of his government. 
In his time the Roman Empire consisted of 
sixty-four provinces and some nine hundred and 
thirty-five cities. It had every advantage of 
soil, climate, and easy transportation. Egypt 
and Syria should have sufficed to support the 
imperial majesty with ease and dignity. The 
former alone contributed yearly to the support 
of Constantinople two hundred and sixty thou- 
sand quarters of wheat. The emperor's pred- 
ecessor, Anastasius, dying, left a treasure of 
some sixty-five million dollars. It is true that 
terrible plagues and earthquakes devastated the 
population and reduced its spirit and courage to 
a minimum. But they were still more dis- 
heartened by the excessive and odious taxes. 
An income tax on the poorest and most toilsome 
in the cities, known as the " gold of afiliction," 
earned him a universal hatred. The peasants 
had to provide vast supplies of corn, and trans- 
port it at their own expense to the imperial 
granaries, an intolerable burden that was in- 
creased by frequent requisitions of an extraordi- 
nary kind. The precious metals decreased in 
quantity, partly through the enormous sums paid 
out annually in shameful and onerous tributes, 



88 JUSTINIAN THE QBE AT, 

partly through pillage and the stoppage of pro- 
duction, owing to endless war. Weapons, build- 
ings, fortifications, alms, the movement of great 
armies and great stores of provisions, consumed 
the enormous taxes. Heavy internal duties 
were laid, not only on arms, but on many ob- 
jects of industry and manufacture, thus render- 
ing any profitable export impossible. The 
manufactures of purple and silk were State 
monopolies. The value of copper money was 
arbitrarily raised one-seventh. The revenue 
was farmed out in many cases, and the venality 
of the collectors was incredible. Honors and 
dignities were put up for sale. The office of the 
magistrate became a trade,, out of which the 
purchaser was justified in reimbursing himself 
for the cost. The rich were compelled to make 
their wills in the imperial favor if they wished 
to save anything for their families; the prop- 
erty of Jews and heretics was mercilessly confis- 
cated. With one voice the people execrated a 
certain John of Cappadocia, the imperial banker 
and minister of finance. For a while the em- 
peror bowed to the storm of indignation, but he 
could not do without the clear head and hard 
heart and stern principles of this man, and so 
recalled him to office. His example of avarice 



JtJSTINlAN THE GEEAT. 89 

and cruelty was, of course, imitated all along 
the line of imperial officers and agents. On the 
other hand, economies that were unjust or un- 
popular or insufficient were introduced — the 
civil list of pensions was cut down, the city was 
no longer lit up at -night, the public carriage of 
the mails was abandoned, the salaries of physi- 
cians reduced or extinguished, the quinquennial 
donative to the soldiers withdrawn. Though 
the unfortunate subjects of Justinian suffered 
untold woes in Greece and Thrace and Syria 
from invasions and the constant movement of 
large bodies of soldiery, their taxes were never 
remitted, hence a multitude of abandoned farms 
and estates. In a word, Justinian "lived with 
the reputation of hidden treasures and be- 
queathed to posterity the payment of his debts." 
His reign is responsible for the economic ex- 
haustion of the Eoman Orient, that was pro- 
longed long enough to permit of the triumph of 
Islam in the next century — one of the most 
solemn proofs of the intimate connection of social 
conditions with religious change and revolution. 
Justinian had one passion, the imperial passion 
par excellence, the passion of architecture.^ He 

1 The art and architecture of ancient Constantinople have never 
ceased to fascinate a multitude of writers since Ducange. Indeed, 



90 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, 

delighted in great works of engineering, in prod- 
igies of mechanical invention. We have seen 
that he bnilt many churches, and rich ones, in 
the Royal City. He eclipsed them all by his 
building of St. Sophia, little thinking that he 
was raising it for the wretched worship of the 
successors of an Arab camel driver. For him 
Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletum 
raised in the air this new thing in architecture, 
bold, light, rich, vast, solemn, and open. Ten 
thousand men worked six years at it. They 
were paid every day at sunset with new-minted 
pieces of silver. And when it was done, the 
emperor, standing amid its virgin and shining 

the series begins much earlier. Procopius added to his fame as a 
writer, if not to his character for honesty, by his "De Edificiis" 
(Bonn ed., 1838). His contemporary, the Guardsman Paul (Silen- 
tiarius) , described in minute detail the glories of Sancta Sophia, and 
a mass of curious information that drifted down the centuries lies 
stored up in the book of the antiquarian Codinus, "De Edificiis " 
(Migne PG., Vols. 157 and 158). The monumental works of Sal- 
zenberg and Labarte have found worthy followers and critics in 
Pulgher, Paspatis, Unger, Bayet, Ferguson, Mtintz, Springer, Kon- 
dakoff, and Kraus. Cf. Choisy, "L'Art de batir chez les Byzan- 
tins" (Paris, 1884); Bayet, "L'Art Byzantin" (Paris, 1883); 
and Mrs. J. B. Bury in ' ' History of the Lower Roman Empire," Vol. 
II., pp. 40-54. Eor the very abundant literature of this subject, cf. 
Kraus, " Geschichte der christlichen Kunst" (Berlin, 1898-99, 
2 vols.). Its profound influence on the symbolism of the Middle 
Ages may be traced partly through " The Painter's Book of Mount 
Athos" in Didron's "Manuel d'Iconographie Grecque et Chr^ti- 
enne" (Paris, 1845). Cf. Edward Freshfield on "Byzantine 
Churches" in Archceologia, Vol. 44, pp. 451-462. 



JUSTINIAN THE GEE AT. 91 

splendors, could cry out, " Glory to God ! . . . 
I have vanquished thee, Solomon ! '' It still 
stands, after twelve hundred years of service, a 
stately monument to the grandeur of his mind 
and the vastness of his ideas. He also built in 
the city the great Chalke, or Brazen Palace, so 
called from a bronze-ceiled hall, and across the 
strait the gardens of the Heraeum on the Asiatic 
shores of the Propontis. Cities rose everywhere 
at his command, and no ignoble ones. We have 
seen what a circle of forts and walls he built 
about the empire, what expensive enterprises 
he carried on in the Holy Land. He built and 
endowed many monasteries and churches else- 
where in the empire. And if he collected sternly, 
he knew how to spend with magnificence. The 
churches of Rome and Ravenna were adorned by 
his generosity — one may yet read in the Liber 
Pontificalis, drawn up by a Roman sacristan, 
the list of church plate given by the emperor to 
the Church of St. Peter. He convoked and 
celebrated a General Council, which was always 
a heavy expense to the empire, for the trans- 
portation and support of the prelates. We do 
not read that he did much for schools. He is 
accused of closing those at Athens. But they 
were pagan schools, and modern critics like 



92 JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT. 

Gregorovius and others doubt whether they were 
closed by any formal edict. ,They fell away by 
reason of the general misery and the emptiness 
and inadequacy of their teaching, unfitted for a 
world that was destined to know no more the 
serenity of the old Hellenic contemplation, whose 
weakness it had exchanged for the saving 
severity of Christian discipline. It is certain 
that he opened law schools at Berytus, Con- 
stantinople, and Kome. He made wise provisions 
for the teaching and conduct of the young 
lawyers on whom the civil service of the State 
was to depend. Justinian was no philosopher ; 
he was a theologian and a grave Christian 
thinker. Perhaps he felt little interest in 
the propagation of Greek culture. He was a 
religious, orthodox man, troubled about his soul, 
and concerned with much prayer and inner 
searching of his spirit. The sweet figments 
of old Greek poets, like the pure mild ra- 
tionalism of Confucius, were no food for the 
ruler of many millions in a decaying and ruinous 
state, no concern of an Isapostolos, the earthly 
and civil Vicegerent of the Crucified. He could 
read in the writings of Cyril of Alexandria, 
scarcely dead a generation before him, of the 
follies and the criminal heart of a Julian the 



JUSTimAN THE GREAT. 93 

Apostate, his predecessor. He saw all around 
him the hopeless congenital weakness of pagan 
philosophy to bear the appalling evils of the 
time. Only the Son of Man could save this 
last stage of the old Graeco-Roman society. To 
Him, therefore, and the Holy Spirit of Celestial 
Wisdom be all public honor rendered ! 



VI. 

Had Justinian done nothing but restore to 
the empire the members torn from it by the 
convulsions of a century, his name would be for- 
ever famous among the great rulers of that 
ancient State. But he did more — he recast the 
laws of Rome and made them serviceable for all 
time — those ancient laws in which, as Sir 
Henry Maine and Rudolph von Ihering have 
shown, are deposited the oldest experiences and 
the most archaic institutions of the great Aryan 
family to which all Western peoples belong. By 
this act he passed into a higher order of men 
than even the autocrators of Old or New Rome ; 
he became a benefactor of humanity — one of 
its solemn pontiffs, peer of Solon and Lycurgus, 
of Aristotle and Plato, of Ulpian and Papinian — 
nay, a greater than they, for their laws have 



94 JUSTINIAN THE GEE AT. 

either perished from society or survive by the 
act of Justinian. It is not easy to put in a nut- 
shell a subject of such infinite charm and im- 
portance. Gibbon thought it worthy of the 
most immortal chapter in his book, and pens 
innumerable have labored at describing this 
great work as men describe the Pyramids or the 
Alps, with minds distracted by admiration and 
the stupor that all true greatness inflicts upon 
us. 

The Laws of Rome! It was a long and 
varied process by which they grew, the steady 
exercise of that terrible Majestas Populi Eo- 
mani. Leges and plehiscita, senatus-consulta and 
responsa prudentum, i.e. the laws of the forum, 
the Senate, and the renowned opinions of learned 
jurists — they had grown century by century, 
until their number was legion and their indi- 
vidual original wisdom was crossed by their suc- 
cessive contradictions and repetitions. For 
seven hundred and fifty years before Christ had 
the City been growing. In that time every 
human interest had come up for consideration. 
The functions of war and peace, of conquest and 
division of spoils and administration, of trade 
and industry, commerce and luxury, production 
and exchange and distribution — every interest 



JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, 95 

arising from the soil, or from tlie family, or 
from human agreements, or from the attempts 
of social authority to assure peace by justice and 
equity — all these had been the object of Roman 
legislation. Originally local and jealous, . so 
local that it looked askance at the men of Veii 
and Praeneste, scarce a day's walk away, it 
expanded mightily and took in what was good 
in all the legislations of the past, all the solid 
deposit of business, common sense, and com- 
mercial practice as it was floating around in 
what came to be known as the Law of Nations. 
The common Roman might see in expansion only 
a chance for trade and power ; the great thinkers 
of the State conceived the purpose of this ex- 
pansion of the city to be, as the Younger Pliny 
put it, " ut humanitatem homini daret,'' i.e. the 
spread of the light of civilization and its bene- 
fits, by the red right hand and the dripping sword 
if need be. Could we read the minutes of the 
meetings of the Roman Senate on the annexation 
of Northern Africa after the Jugurthan war, we 
should be reminded, I dare say, of a certain late 
session of our own august body of legislators, so 
true is it that history repeats itself. 

When the republic lapsed into an empire, so 
gently that the first emperor dared only call 



96 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 

himself the foremost citizen, the lawmaking 
power was the first to pass away from the 
people. Henceforth there are no leges — the 
world is governed by the will of the imperator, 
and he acts through constitutions and rescripts, 
ix. general and particular decisions, which are 
registered in the imperial chancery and become 
the actual law of the land. Besides, there was 
a peculiar annual legislation of the praetor, or 
city magistrate, and another body of law arising 
from the opinions of licensed lawyers — ratioci- 
nated decisions that originally won the force of 
law by their reasonableness, and in time were 
collected in books and held almost as sacred as 
lex or constitution. What all this reached to, 
after five centuries of imperial government of 
the world, one may well imagine. 

As the will of the emperor was the real 
source of law since Cassar's death, so the first 
attempt at a reform or a codification of the law 
must begin with the imperial constitutions. 
Two hundred years and more before Justinian, 
in Old Kome, this need had been felt, and the 
Gregorian and Hermogenian codes had been pre- 
pared for official use. But they were soon 
antiquated, and a new one, the famous Theodosian 
Codex, was issued in 438 by the Emperor 



JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, 97 

Theodosius II. But it was rare^ bulky, costly, 
and therefore not always at hand. Moreover, 
numerous grave constitutions had been added 
since 438, precisely a time of transition, when 
the lawmaking genius is called on most earnestly 
to adapt the rule to the facts. Justinian estab- 
lished, February 13, 528, a commission of ten 
men — decemviri — to execute a new code. 
Tribonian and Theophilus were the principal 
lawyers, and they were charged to see that only 
up-to-date constitutions were incorporated, minus 
all that was obsolete or superfluous or repetition 
or preamble. They might erase, add, or alter 
words in the older constitutions they accepted, 
if it was necessary for their use as future law. 
He wanted three things, brevity, compactness, 
and clearness, and in less than fourteen months 
he received them in the document to which he 
gave the name of Codex Jitstinianeus, and which 
was published April 7, 529. 

The next step was harder — it was a question 
of collecting and sifting the responsa prudentum, 
or answers given by recognized and licensed 
lawyers, and which had always enjoyed a high 
degree of consideration before the magistrates 
of Rome.. They were the real philosophers of 
the law, but philosophers after the Roman 



98 JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT. 

heart, — terse, grave, direct, — condensing a para- 
graph of difeseness into one strong, luminous 
line that seemed to shed truth and peace along 
its whole length. These answers had been 
given for over a thousand years, and were then 
scattered about in numberless treatises — it is 
said over two thousand, to speak only of those 
enjoying actual authority. They had been the 
bane of the Roman bar for many a day. Since 
they were all good law, and apparently equal, 
the practice of law had degenerated into cita- 
tions — whoever had the most dead men to 
speak for him was the victor. This was intol- 
erable ; it came at last to the famous Law of 
Citations, that fixed the five greatest names, and 
among them, as senior or chief, the immortal 
Papinian, that high priest, king, and prophet 
of all lawyers, past, present, and to come. 

At this huge mass of ancient law, therefore, 
a new commission was directed, under the 
authority of Tribonian. From this Golden 
Dust-heap they were to extract, to enucleate, 
what was good and useful as law or interpre- 
tation or illustration. Out of all the materials 
they should erect a fair and holy temple of 
justice, divided into fifty books, and these prop- 
erly subdivided and paragraphed and numbered. 



JUSTINIAiar THE GBEAT. 99 

It meant that the decisions of thirteen hundred 
years, had to be gone over, and, according to 
present utihty, a choice struck and the balance 
rejected. Seventeen specialists did it in three 
years. The work was called the "Digest," or 
" Pandects." There are in it something less than 
ten thousand sententice, or brief opinions of an- 
cient lawyers, harmonized, castigated, clarified 
— at least Justinian and his lawyers thought 
so. Could Cujas or Donelli have been at their 
side, what reproachful looks they would have 
cast! For the Middle Ages hunted out end- 
less contradictions in the huge mass of these 
" opinions " that only external authority had 
united. Thereby the ancestors of our present 
lawyers lived fair and lovely lives, with rich 
benefices and fine gowns of silk or brocade, 
and the noblest palaces in the town, and ample 
esteem from Church and State. How they 
must have smiled when they heard Boccaccio 
or Pietro Dante commenting on the poet's 
famous line, 

" D'entro alle leggi trassi il troppo e il vano." 

It is calculated that by the edition of the 
Digest a law library of one hundred and six 
books was reduced to five and a third, a com- 

LofC. 



100 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 

parison that only faintly reflects the relief that 
its publication gave. Finally the emperor caused 
the preparation in four books of a manual of the 
principles of Roman Law^ which he called the 
" Institutions." It became a part of the codified 
law, being largely a reproduction and adaptation 
of a similar work of the second century that was 
owing to the great j insist Gaius.^ 

This work of Justinian has met with some 
reproaches from our modern critics ; perhaps 
they are deserved. It has been accused of too 
much theorizing, too much ratiocination, too 
much blending of the schoolmaster with the leg- 
islator to the detriment of the latter. But what 
man of heart will blame the emperor for per- 
mitting " the pagan Tribonian to preserve the 
color and tone of second and third century 
Stoicism, for the occasional brief reflections on 
the origin and nature of ^ human liberty and 
human dignity ? They are delicious oases in a 
desert of rigid rules and sententious decisions. 
In this new Roman Law it is the spirit and 
the content of the Law of Nations that pre- 
dominate. The old, hard, selfish Romanism is 

1 The vicissitudes of the law of Justinian in the Latin Middle 
Ages- have been described fully in the classic work of Savigny, 
and by a host of later writers. For its history in the Orient, cf. 
Mortreuil, " Histoire du droit Byzantin" (Paris, 1843-46, 3 vols.). 



JUSTINIAN THE GEEAT. 101 

eliminated. From the Golden Horn the Genius 
of Order lifts up an illuminating torch to shine 
afar over the Euxine of the Barbarians and 
the Hellespont of the Greeks — nay, across the 
Mediterranean and ^gean, even beyond the 
Pillars of Hercules, and to follow forevermore 
with its sunlike radiance every path of human 
endeavor, every channel of human contention, 
every relation of man to man and of practical 
government to its subjects. 

This Roman Law, after all, was the salt and 
the light of the Middle Ages. For love of it, 
even before Justinian, the Ataulfs and the 
Wallias, standing at the parting of the ways, 
had renounced becoming a Gothia and were 
willing to be incorporated in a Romania. They 
adopted it at once, begging the Catholic bishops 
of their new kingdoms to accommodate it to 
their present needs, their racial genius, and their 
immemorial customs. So arose the invaluable 
Leges Barharorum of Frank and Burgundian 
and Visigoth and Vandal. Only, the Catholic 
Church would have no separatist barbarian law, 
even of that kind. All her ecclesiastics lived 
by the genuine and common Roman Law, the 
Law of Justinian : Ecclesia vivit lege Romana. 
Indeed, she was its second saviour, and thereby 



102 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, 

the saviour of good government^ for in the West 
it gradually went over very largely into her 
Canon Law. It was the basis and glory of her 
oldest university, Bologna, and was the usual 
path to honor and fame and power. There are 
those who regret its excessive vitality, since it 
bears along with it the stamp of its origin, the 
absolute will of one ruler, which makes it at 
all times the favorite code of centralized power. 
The Code Napoleon is built on it, as are most 
of the great modern codes of Europe. Even 
Mohammedan law as it arose, in Egypt and 
Syria especially, accepted and applied the ex- 
isting law of Justinian that had been working 
more than a century in these unhappy lands 
when, for their folly and stupidity, the night of 
Islam settled down on them. 

It is the Christian, however, who rejoices 
most at this act of Justinian. Those Eoman 
laws that Tertullian denounced were now bap- 
tized.^ A spirit of humanity henceforth breathed 
from them. The rights of the moral code were 



1 " Postremo legum obstruitur auctoritas adversus earn (sc. veri- 
tatem). ... Si lex tua erravit, puto, ab homine concepta est; 
neque enim de coelo ruit." — Tertullian, "Apologeticum," c. iv, 20. 
The entire opusculum is the protest of a great Eoman lawyer against 
the inhuman and anomalous iniquities of the Eoman Law as applied 
to the Christians. 



JUSTINIAN THE GEEAT. 103 

incorporated into the legal code; religion was 
not separate from conduct. The new law 
showed itself most practical in this, that it recog- 
nized Christianity as triumphant, as the popular 
religion, and in many ways made a large place 
for it, recognized its teachers and chiefs as the 
principal supporters of the State and of public 
order. The political life of the Middle Ages is 
all in the Law of Justinian, especially in the 
Code of his Constitutions, and for this alone it is 
the most remarkable of books after the inspired 
writings and the ancient councils. 

It is not wonderful that Dante, at once the 
greatest of architectonic poets and last prophet of 
the empire, crying out over its grave, should speak 
more than once of Justinian and his laws. In 
the famous lines of the "Purgatorio" (VI. 89) his 
whole soul flames out in irrepressible anger : — 

" Ah 1 servile Italy, grief's hostelry ! 
A ship without a pilot in great tempest ! 
1^0 lady thou of provinces, but brothel ! 
***** * 

What boots it that for thee Justinian 
The bridle mend, if empty be the saddle?" 

In the superb sixth canto of the " Paradiso '' he 
personifies in Justinian the imperial authority 
that to him is the basis of the State : — 

" Csesar I was and am Justinian." 



104 JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT. 

Into the mouth of this shadowy shepherd of 
men he puts that glorious romantic account of 
the growth of the Roman name and power: — 

"What it achieved from Var unto the Rhine, 
Isere beheld and Saone, beheld the Seine 
And every valley whence the Rhone is filled ; 
What it achieved when it had left Ravenna, 
And leaped the Rubicon, was such a flight 
That neither tongue nor pen could follow it.'* 

The true career of Justinian appears to the 
mediaeyal poet of Italy and Catholicism as that 
of a " living justice " inspired by God, as the 
career of a man who upheld the " standard 
sacrosanct " of order and equity, and thereby 

" placed the world in so great peace 
That unto Janus was his temple closed.'* 

Elsewhere (Canzone XYIII. v. 37) he gives 
voice to the deepest sentiment of the Middle 
Ages, when he hails in Italy the serene and 
glorious custodian of law and order, the true 
heiress of the genius and calling of the Im- 
perium that are indelibly stamped on the 
" Pandects " and " Code " : — 

" O patria, degna di trionf al f ama, 

De' magnanimi madre, 
****** 

Segui le luci di Giustiniano, 

E le focose tue malgiuste leggi 

Con discrezion correggi, 

Sicche le laudi '1 mondo e '1 divin regno." 



JUSTINIAN THE GEE AT, 105 

VII. 

In the preceding pages little has been said of 
Justinian from an ecclesiastical point of view, 
partly because it is the civil or profane side of 
his life that here attracts ns, partly because of 
the vast and absorbing interest of the questions 
and problems that are exhibited when we lift the 
innermost veil of ecclesiastical history. It was 
the fate of Justinian to enter upon the last scene 
of a passionate conflict whose unity had not 
been broken for a century. The motives of the 
last protagonists were not always pure or praise- 
worthy. Local jealousies, festering old sores of 
a political or economic-social nature, velleities 
of Coptic and Syrian independence, violent con- 
tempt and hatred for the Koyal City and its 
Greek bureaucracy that these paid back with 
interest, prevented the theological questions of 
the day from being viewed by all in the dispas- 
sionate light of simple faith and old tradition. 
The wrongs of Nestorius were still a rallying cry 
in Syria, and the injustice wreaked on Dioscorus 
still roused the fellaheen of Egypt. Obscene 
spirits, as usual, abounded, and fished fortune out 
of the troubled waters along which moved pain- 
fully the bark of Peter. Old sects, schisms, and 



106 JUSTINIAN THE GEE AT. 

heresies, almost forgotten by the churchmen of 
the day, still Hved on in remote corners of the 
Orient, to strike hands on occasion with the 
Nestorian or Monophysite against the common 
enemy by the Golden Horn.^ Here theology 
and tax-gathering were cultivated with equal 
ardor until the broken peasant by the Nile or 
the Orontes knew not what he hated most — the 
latest fiscal oppression or the noble Tomus of 
the great Leo that the local Monophysite clergy 
had so distorted as to make it pass for a blast 
from Antichrist. 

Every emperor, from the time of the second 
Theodosius, had longed to close these gaping 
wounds, and had even attempted the same with 
more or less success. In the wild and universal 
conflict the independence of the ecclesiastical 

1 For tlie history of the government of the Greek churches in and 
since the time of Justinian the work of Cardinal Pitra is invaluable, 
"Juris Ecclesiastic! Grseci Historia et Monumenta" (Rome, 1864- 
68, 2 vols.) ; cf. the '« Oriens Christianus" of Le Quien (Paris, 1740, 
3 vols., fol.), and the precious compilation of Leo AUatius, "De 
Ecclesise Occidentalis et Orientalis perpetua consensione " (Cologne, 
1649). Of great value to the historian are the materials collected 
by Miklosisch and Mliller, "Acta et Diplomata monasteriorum 
Orientis" (1871-90, 3 vols.), and by Cardinal Hergenrother, 
"Monumenta Grseca ad Photium ejusque historiam pertinentia" 
(Ratisbon, 1869). Usually fair and well-informed is Neale, " His- 
tory of the Holy Eastern Church" (London, 1847-50, 4 vols.), of 
which the first two contain a general introduction, the latter a 
history of the Patriarchate of Alexandria. 



JUSTTNIAN THE GREAT. 107 

power was pushed aside as secondary to the res- 
toration of outward order and concord. It was an 
age of great personal and corporate ambitions, 
on the part of the Oriental clergy in particular. 
The rapid successions to episcopal sees, brought 
about by heresy and schism, roused an unholy 
cupidity in the souls of men otherwise inoffen- 
sive to Church or State. Only from Rome do 
we hear regularly the genuine principles of the 
relations of the two powers, and only there is 
any effective resistance preached and carried 
out against the evil Csesaro-papism that lurked 
in every imperial heart since Constantine.^ Jus- 

1 Much has been written in the last three centuries on the rela- 
tions of Church and State at Constantinople. Cf. Eiffel, "Ge- 
schichtliche Darstellung der Verhandlungen zwischen Kirche und 
Staat" (Mainz, 1836), Vol. I.; Niehues, " Geschichte der Ver- 
handlungen zwischen Kaiserthum und Papsthum im Mittelalter" 
(Miinster,' 1877-90, 2 vols.). The monograph of A. Gasquet, 
"L'Autorit6 imp^riale en matiere religieuse h. Byzance" (Paris, 
1879), and his "ifetudes Byzantines" (ihid.^ 1888), are of superior 
worth. Admirable in every way is Charles Diehl's "l^tude sur 
1' administration byzantine en Italic " (Paris, 1888), especially c. vi., 
pp. 368-417, on the relations of the Roman Church with the Em- 
peror of Constantinople. They may be read most usefully in con- 
nection with the notes of the Abb6 Duchesne to his edition of the 
" Liber Pontificalis. " Cf. Ternovsky, " Die griechische Kirche und 
die Periode der allgemeinen Kirchenversammlungen " (Kiew, 1883) ; 
Gelzer, "Die politische und kirchliche Stellung von Byzanz " (Leip- 
zig, 1879) ; Krliger, " Monophysitische Streitigkeiten im Zusam- 
menhang mit der Reichspolitik " (Jena, 1884), These latter works 
are colored by the peculiar convictions of their learned authors, as is 
also Pichler, " Geschichte der kirchlichen Trennung zwischen Orient 



108 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 

tinian was no exception. First among the em- 
perors he attains the character of a theologian 
by his edicts and decrees in the long conflict 
that arose with the condemnation of Origenism 
and ended in the painful business of the Three 
Chapters. Here he recalled the worst day of 
Arianism, when Constantius at Milan laughed 
to scorn the canons of the Church and bade the 
bishops remember that he was their Canon Law. 
Justinian had been brought up religiously; the 
little manual of conduct that the good deacon 
Agapetus prepared for him is yet preserved, and 
has always been highly esteemed as the parent 
of those numerous Instructiones Principum, 
Monitiones, and the like that we meet with in 
the Middle Ages. He was profuse, by word and 
act, in his devotion to the Apostolic See of 
Peter; he acknowledged the supremacy of its 
authority that had stood a rude and long test 

und Occident ' ' (Munich, 1864) . The Catholic point of view is magis- 
terially expounded in the first volume of the classic work of Cardinal 
Hergenrother, "Photius" (Regensburg, 1867-69, 3 vols.). It also 
contains the best resume of Byzantine church history before Pho- 
tius. Of this work Krumbacher, the historian of Byzantine litera- 
ture, says (p. 232): " Hauptschrift iiber Photius ist und bleibt wohl 
noch langer Zeit das durch Gelehrsamkeit und Objectivitat ausge- 
zeichnete Werk des Kardinals J. Hergenrother." In Pitzipios, 
"L'l]glise Orientale " (Paris, 1888), there is a popular description 
from a Catholic viewpoint of the politico-ecclesiastical role of the 
city and clergy of Constantimople from its foundation. 



JUSTINIAN THE GEE AT, 109 

in the Acacian schism just closed, and the 
"Liber Pontificalis" relates with complacency his 
gifts to the Roman churches. He received 
Pope Agapetus. with all honor, but his treat-' 
ment of the unhappy Yigilius has drawn down 
on him the merited reprobation of all.^ Perhaps 
he felt less esteem for the person of the latter, 
whom he had known intimately as a companion 
of Agapetus; perhaps, too, his own final lapse 
into the heresy of an extreme Monophysite 
sect was a just sanction for the violence done 
to a sinning but repentant successor of Peter. 
He confirmed the ambition of the patriarchs of 
Constantinople and secured finally for them the 
second rank, at least in honor. Under him the 
third canon of the Council of Constantinople 
(381), and the twenty-eighth canon of the Coun- 
cil of Chalcedon (451), that Rome had energeti- 
cally rejected, were tacitly accepted. In the 
long struggle the honor and the liberties of 
Alexandria and Antioch had gone down in 
spite of the papal efforts to save them. The 
consequences of this were seen within a century, 
in the rapid, unhindered spread of Islam over 

1 Cf. "Liber Pontificalis'' (ed. Duchesne), s.v. " Vigilius" ; Du- 
chesne, "Revue des Questions Historiques" (April, 1895) ; Thomas 
Hodgkin, "Italy and Her Invaders" (Oxford, 1896, 2d ed.), Vol. 
IV., c. xxiii.; "The Sorrows of Vigilius," pp. 571-594. 



110 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT, 

Egypt and Syria, and its assimilation of Persia, 
whereby the fall of Constantinople was made 
certain. He ruled the churches at pleasure 
and with a rod of iron, divided ecclesiastical 
provinces, deposed and exiled the highest pa- 
triarchs, and not only humiliated St. Peter 
in the person of Yigilius, but compelled his 
successors to ask for imperial confirmation and 
to send large sums of money to secure it. It 
was well for the churches that no second Jus- 
tinian followed him. But his despotic temper 
and his precedents were not soon forgotten. 
Perhaps it may be urged for him that he met 
habitually only a weak and sycophantic curial 
clergy, and that the ancient bonds of empire 
were all but dissolved in the Orient. He is 
still remembered in the Greek Church for his 
hymns, one of which is still in frequent use.^ 



1 *' Only-begotten Son and Word of God, Immortal, Who didst 
vouchsafe for our salvation to take flesh of the holy Mother of 
God and Ever- Virgin Mary, and didst without mutation become 
man and v^ast crucified, Christ our God, and by death didst over- 
come death, being One of the Holy Trinity and glorified together 
with the Father and the Holy Ghost, save us." — Julian, "Dic- 
tionary of Hymnology" (London, 1892), p. 460. Cf. Edmond 
Bouvy, "Les Origines de la Po^sie Chr^tienne," in "Lettres Chr6- 
tiennes" (1882), Vol. IV., and for the hymn, " Christ and Parani- 
kas," '' Anthologia Grseca Carminum Christianorum " (Leipzig, 
1871), p. 52 ; Stevenson, " Du rhythme dans I'hymnographie 
grecque" {Correspondant, October, 1876), and the epoch-making 



JUSTINIAN THE GBEAT, 111 

Indeed, lie is^ perhaps, the oldest hymnographer 
of the Greeks. But when all has been said, it 
remains true that his was the timely, welcome, 
and long reign of an orthodox emperor, that 
he broke the impact of Monophysitism, that he 
was generous beyond measure to the churches, 
and to the poor extremely charitable. The 
Christian episcopate of the East looked" on him 
as a father and a providence, and in the storms 
of the century he was never too far below his 
high calling. The Western churches loved to 
remember him as he is depicted in mosaic in 
San Vitale at Ravenna, clad in imperial purple, 
surrounded by his officers of state and offering 
gifts to the bishop of that see.^ 



essay of Cardinal Pitra, " Hymnograpliie de Tifeglise Grecque" 
(Rome, 1867). 

1 The admirable writings of Charles Diehl on the Byzantine 
regime in the sixth and seventh centuries are especially worthy of 
commendation, notably his "Justinien" (Paris, 1902). Justinian 
holds a place of honor among the writers of Christian hymns ; cf . 
W. Christ and M. Paranikas, "Anthologia Grseca Carminum 
Christianorum " (Leipzig, 1871). For his policy in matters of re- 
ligion, cf. the dissertations of F. Diekamp, " Die Origenistischen 
Streitigkeiten im VI. Jahrhundert" (Miinster, 1899), and Hist. 
Jahrbuch (1900), Vol. XXI., pp. 743-757; A. Knecht, "Die Reli- 
gionspolitik Kaiser Justinians I." (Wtirzburg, 1896), and the 
article " Origenistic Controversies" in Smith and Wace, "Dic- 
tionary of Christian Biography, ' ' Vol. IV. The golden booklet " On 
the Duties of a Christian Ruler," dedicated to the emperor in 532, 
by his teacher, the deacon Agapetus, may be read in Migne, PG., 



112 JUSTINIAN THE GREAT. 

To the bishops of the West, standing amid 
the ruins of Roman civihzation, his person and 
reign appeared like those of another Constantine. 
He was, indeed, a beacon light, set fair and firm 
where the old world of Greece and Rome came 
to an end, and along its last stretches the 
stormy ocean of mediaeval life already beat 
threateningly. 

Ixxxvi., 1163-86. It opens worthily the long and important series 
of mediseval Monita and Instructiones for princes, that contain so 
much Christian pedagogical material, and are usually neglected in 
all histories of mediaeval pedagogy. 



THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. 

The dogma of Islam is simple — one all-pow- 
erful God whose prophet is Mohammed, and who 
will reward the good and punish the wicked. 
But Allah is remote from the world, toward 
which he is indeed merciful through his prophets, 
but between which and him there exists no rela- 
tion of fatherhood and sonship. Islam recog- 
nizes a revelation closed in Mohammed, but no 
absolute necessity of redemption, hence no Incar- 
nation of Christ, who is to the Mohammedan 
only one of the admirable hnman prophets whom 
God sent at divers times and whose line ends in 
the son of Abdallah. It denies the Trinity and 
travesties the Christian conception of that august 
mystery. While it admits intermediary spirits, 
inspiration, the last judgment, and the resurrec- 
tion of the body, it clothes all these teachings in 
a gross, sensual, and repugnant form, which robs 
them of that divine charm that they possess in 
the Christian presentment of them. The Koran 
is the Bible of Islam, or rather its fetich, and 
upon and about it the doctors have built in 

113 



114 THE BELIGION OF ISLAM, 

the course of time a very Babel of expositions 
and human traditions, which in daily life a:ffect 
the morality of Mohammedans no less than the 
teachings of their Sacred Book itself. 

Abul Kasem Ibn Abdallah, usually styled 
Mohammed or Mahomet (the praised), was born 
about 570 A.D. at Mecca, in the Hijaz or west- 
ern part of Arabia, not far from the Eed Sea, 
amid the bare granite hills and sandy wastes of 
that loneliest and most monotonous of regions. 
From the middle of the fifth century Mecca had 
been the centre of a little religious state, whose 
chief object of worship was the Kaaba, or holy 
black stone, supposed to have been given by an 
angel to Ishmael, the father of the Arabs, and 
close to which was the sacred well Zemzem, 
which sprang up in the desert for Hagar and 
her son during their wanderings. The inhab- 
itants of the town lived by commerce, for the 
Kaaba had already become the national sanctu- 
ary of many of the Arab tribes, and at the yearly 
fairs during the four months of the Sacred Truce 
its streets were filled with the Bedouin, whose 
usual home was on the pathless wastes, beneath 
the cloudless skies of a land phenomenally rain- 
less. Religion and commerce, friendship and 
poetry, drew the children of the desert yearly to 



THE BELIGION OF ISLAM. 115 

Mecca. They met there the caravans returning 
from Palestine, Syria, and Persia, and there they 
joined in the famous poetical tournaments, of 
which some remnant is left in the elegant Moal- 
lakats or " suspended " poems, said to have been 
so named because written in letters of gold on 
parchment or silk and hung up on the curtains 
of the Kaaba. They were a fierce, natural, sen- 
sual race, self-reliant and daring, trusting to the 
camel and the horse, overflowing with the love 
of life and pleasure, but ever conscious that the 
sum of both was an evanescent quantity — 
hence the streak of gravity and melancholy 
which runs through their ancient poetic remains. 
Their lives ran on between the simple pursuits of 
a nomadic pastoral life and a constant series of 
razzias and vendettas, arising often from the most 
trivial cause, but which became sacred legacies 
through the intense domestic attachments of a 
people who had yet no higher notion of the State 
than a congeries of families. Withal, there were 
sprouting strong germs of national consciousness 
in the similarity of tastes and pursuits, the un- 
mixed strain of blood, the songs of the poets and 
the ancient genealogies, the souvenirs of com- 
mon losses and common victories. They defied 
from time immemorial the yoke of the stranger. 



116 THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. 

Persia, Rome, and Byzantium had never been able 
to obtain more than a precarious footing on their 
confines. They believed in a confused way in 
one God, but they prayed to the stars, to their 
amulets, to genii and ogres and demons. It 
needed only an enthusiast from their own race 
to compact the scattered elements of greatness 
which these clear, hard, passionate, untutored 
men offered to the founder of a religion or a 
state. This was the work of Mohammed, and 
in it he was singularly favored by internal and 
external circumstances. 

The morality of the Moslem may be reduced 
to the five great points and to the practice of 
certain natural virtues. The five command- 
ments are the confession of Allah and his 
prophet Mohammed, prayer by prostration to- 
ward Mecca five times a day, fasting from sun- 
rise to sunset during the month of Ramadan, at 
least one pilgrimage to Mecca, and the bestowal 
of two and one-half per cent, of one's property 
in alms. Add the duty of sacred war, the fre- 
quent ablutions, and the observance of Friday 
(without cessation of labor) as a holy day and 
we have the substance of the precepts of the 
Moslem morality. Honesty, benevolence, mod- 
esty, fraternity, and charity are recommended, 



THE BELIGION OF ISLAM, 117 

especially among the Moslems. Deceit, lying, 
and slander are severely reproved, while gam- 
bling and the use of wine and other intoxicating 
liquors are forbidden. Their external morality 
is essentially Talmudic, interwoven with a mul- 
titude of minute essential ceremonies. They 
acknowledge to woman a soul, the hope of im- 
mortality, and certain civil rights, but polyg- 
amy, divorce, slavery, and a jealous seclusion 
make her life that of an inferior and degraded 
being. 

Sin is the contravention of legal enactment; 
the Mussulman does not comprehend the Chris- 
tian idea that there is an inherent right and 
wrong in human actions, that God is a moral 
being. To him He is an absolute Oriental mon- 
arch, who has hung irrevocably the fate of each 
man about his neck and toward whom the 
chief, almost the only, feeling is an exaggerated 
and sickly quietism, Islam, which means submis- 
sion or resignation. Fatalism, the almost utter 
absence of correct notions concerning the spirit- 
ual life, the degrading example of 'the private 
life of the prophet who is for the Moslem the 
most stainless of men, the absolute exclu- 
siveness and intolerance of their rehgion, the 
impracticable amalgamation of the civil and the 



118 THE BELIGION OF ISLAM, 

spiritual^ the pseudo-theocratic basis of social 
life — all these elements are working to keep 
Mohammedanism a stationary religion, except 
among races of very inferior cultm^e. It is yet 
powerful in Asia and Africa, where it controls 
the souls of two hundred millions, but with its 
political reverses, it has lost the secret of its 
success, and the four hundred millions of pro- 
gressive and energetic Christendom no longer 
fear the crescent, as in days of old, when it 
waved simultaneously in Spain and Greece, in 
Italy, Austria, and Hungary, and was only kept 
at bay by a line of venerable pontiffs, who 
found in the sole religion of Christ the means of 
arresting the triumphant course of Oriental fa- 
naticism and sensuality. 

Mohammed grew up poor, under the care of 
near relatives. He was a posthumous son, and 
his mother, a sickly, nervous woman, died while 
he was yet a child. He herded sheep and 
gathered wild berries for a living. Moslem 
writers relate many legendary and miraculous 
tales of this period, but they are evidently later 
inventions meant to glorify the youth of the 
prophet and to accredit his revelations. In time 
he entered the service of a rich widow, Kadidja, 
and after several commercial journeys in her 



TEE BELIGION OF ISLAM. 119 

interest, espoused her in his twenty-fifth year. 
It was the turning-point of his fortunes, for, 
though of the distinguished family of the Ko- 
raish, he had inherited almost nothing. With 
Kadidja he obtained not only social prominence 
and wealth, but a woman of spirit and intelli- 
gence, who plays no small part in his career. 
About 610 A.D. certain strange dreams and 
visions began to haunt him. He was naturally 
of a high-strung, excitable temperament, and 
according to some authorities, an epileptic. 
Certainly he manifested in this period of his 
life unmistakable symptoms of hysteria or of 
catalepsy. Long swoons, during which he re- 
mained unconscious, were not uncommon. His 
mind ran much on religious questions, and he 
was wont to retire yearly for a considerable time 
to a mountain near Mecca for prayer and medi- 
tation. On one of these occasions he seemed to 
see the angel Gabriel, who held before him a 
silken scroll, on which he read that " man walk- 
eth in delusion when he deems that he suffices 
for himself; to the Lord they must all return." 
From this time, for two or three years, he was 
much troubled, but Kadidja comforted and 
guided him, with the result that all waverings 
passed away and he arose convinced of his mis- 



120 THE BELIGION OF ISLAM. 

sion. At least it would seem that he was honest 
in the early part of his career, whatever we may 
think of his later accommodation and tergiver- 
sation. To these years belong the older parts of 
the Koran and many of the purer and better 
elements of the revelation which he went on 
piecing together from day to day. It was in this 
period also that he fell in with the Hanif s, or Ara- 
bian ascetics, who seemed to have been half Chris- 
tian, and to have practised many of the virtues of 
those Christian solitaries who peopled the deserts 
of the border-land between Syria and Arabia, and 
who exercised from the beginning a profound 
influence on the neighboring Saracens or Bedouin 
Heretical priests, Jewish teachers, and Arabian 
monks seem to have had no small share in the 
formation of his spiritual character, and the 
influences of Christianity are all the more proba- 
ble because of his condition as a merchant and 
his voyages into Palestine and Syria. 

Whatever be the complex origin of his beliefs, 
he made converts slowly. His wife, his cousin 
Ali, his father-in-law Abu-bekr, an old slave 
Zaid, and a few others were all who came 
around him at first. His preaching was dis- 
tasteful to the Meccans, and the Koraish would 
have done him bodily harm if they, did not fear; 



THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. 121 

his uncle, Abu Talib, the head of the family. 
Several of his followers suffered much from 
the townsmen, who were incensed at a preach- 
ing that decried their idols and threatened to 
hurt trade and business. They were sheltered 
by the Christian Abyssinians. Mohammed en- 
tered on a kind of compromise at this juncture, 
but soon regretted it, whereupon the Meccans 
decided on his death. But he escaped by the 
aid of his family, especially of Ali, his most de- 
voted cousin, and took refuge in Yahtrib (Me- 
dina), where he had already made a number of 
converts, who had agreed to sustain him in 
spite of the opposition and the interdict of the 
Koraish of Mecca. This is the famous Hegira, 
or flight of Mohammed, in the month of June, 
622, from which date the Moslems have since 
counted the flow of time. Jewish proselytism, 
Messianic hopes, reminiscences of Christian 
virtue, had long been rife in Medina, and they 
now met in the head of a melancholy religious 
dreamer, together with scraps of apocrjrphal 
gospels and ignorant heretical expositions of 
Christianity. It was a marvellous period. 
All over the Orient a hundred heresies were pul- 
lulating, and in the unhealthy spiritual activity 
of the time many could not see the great differ- 



122 THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. 

ence between the simple dogma, the rational cnl- 
tus, the earnest, moral ideal of Mohammed 
and many an heretical travesty of the Christian 
teaching. At Medina Mohammed built the 
first plain mosque, instituted the Moslem 
clergy, and laid the foundations of the theocracy 
which has since done service as a government 
in a great part of the Orient. His skill and 
success as a judge won the hearts of those of 
Medina, and he soon enjoyed the confidence 
of the entire community. From 622 to 630 he 
waged war with the Meccans, intercepted their 
caravans, overthrew their armies, and finally 
besieged and took the holy city in January of 
the latter year. 

The conquest of the national sanctuary re- 
acted powerfully upon Mohammed and Islam. 
At heart he was an Arab and a Meccan. He 
loved the glory and renown of his race. The 
Koraish, once his enemies, cante over to him 
and took control of the movement. What was 
once an individual, internal, spiritual enterprise 
became a carnal, external pursuit of glory, 
power, and booty. The idols were destroyed, it 
is true, but transformed into minor spirits — 
djinn, div, peri, and the like ; the holy stone of 
the Kaaba remained intact ^ Mecca was the na- 



THE BELIGION OF ISLAM, 123 

tional and holy capital; most of the ancient 
ceremonies were retained. It cost the Arabs no 
change of heart, for there had never been more 
at stake than the business chances of the city, 
and that was settled by the victory of Moham- 
med and the acceptance of his formulas, for 
which they otherwise found justification in 
their ancient traditions of monotheism. They 
passionately loved booty and the foray, and 
the revelations of Mohammed and the successes 
of eight years opened up an endless vista of 
war and pillage — even the conquest of those dim, 
outlying worlds of Persia and Byzantium. The 
state of Medina had conquered the state of 
Mecca, only to bring to the latter the homage of 
victory. From every quarter came in adhesions 
to the political revolution in response to the 
missionaries sent out by Mohammed, and be- 
fore his death, in June, 632, he had the satis- 
faction of seeing all the masses of Arabian 
society accept the inevitable, and enter the new 
Semitic alliance. The Christian tribes were too 
weak to resist, but the Jews and the Magians 
made a bolder front, and for a while were re- 
spected. 

Prominent among the means of spreading the 
doctrine of Islam was the Koran, which means 



124 THE BELIGION OF' ISLAM, 

reading or recitation, i.e. the revelations made 
by the Holy Spirit or Gabriel to the prophet. It 
consists of one hundred and sixteen suras or 
chapter-like divisions, each of which contains 
from three to nearly three hundred verses. The 
whole is scarcely as large as the New Testament 
and contains an extremely varied matter — cere- 
monial and civil laws, answers and reproofs, dis- 
quisitions on the attributes of God, attacks on 
idolaters, the Jews, and Christians, narratives of 
prophets and saints, travesties of Christian 
teaching, echoes and even technical terms^^rom 
the Talmud, histories from the New Testament 
Apocrypha, and a. chaotic mass of instruction 
without any order, logical or chronological. It 
is full of the grossest errors and betrays the ab- 
sence of all literary culture in its compilers. It 
is doubtful whether Mohammed ever wTote any- 
thing — doubtful whether there were any Arabic 
books in the strict sense before his time. The 
Koran appears to many critics to be the first 
written work in the tongue, though the latter 
was long since a polished language. Its con- 
tents range all the way from short, oracular 
statements, that seem as though torn from the 
speaker under violent pressure, to cool, deliberate 
legislation. Much of it is su];ely the work of 



THE BELIGION OF ISLAM, 125 

reflection, compiled with deliberate intent to 
deceive, according as the circumstances made 
revelations useful or handy. Its gradual origin 
is tangible in the number of abrogated laws that 
it contains. In its present form it dates from 
the Chalif Othman, about the middle of the 
seventh century, who had a new recension made 
of the original compilation, executed by Zaid, 
the former amanuensis of Mohammed, at the 
command of Omar. At that time the suras 
were preserved only on bits of flat stones, on 
pieces of leather, ribs of palm leaves, and in the 
memory of the companions of the prophet. Yet 
it is believed that we have the Koran substan- 
tially as it was current shortly after the prophet's 
death. The Moslems believe that it is eternal 
and uncreated, immanent in God as His divine 
word, and that it came down from heaven in a 
series of descents. According to the Hanbalite 
sect, it lay from all eternity upon a shining white 
table of stone as broad as from east to west and 
as long as from earth to heaven, while an angel 
with drawn sword stood guard over it. The 
Mohammedan looks upon its style as something 
inimitably perfect and a suflicient guarantee of 
its divine inspiration. It is certain that it pos- 
sesses considerable beauty, much wild force of 



126 THE BELIGION OF ISLAM. 

passion, high imagery, and vigorous rhetoric. 
But all European Orientalists do not see such 
sustained perfection in its rhymed phrase. Ac- 
cording to Noeldeke, there is much verbiage in 
it, loose connection of thought, repetition of the 
same words and phrases; in fact, the book 
shows that the prophet was no master of style, 
although such a statement is worse than poly- 
theism to the ears of a pious Turk or Arab. 

The doctrine of Islam was spread by the 
sword. The idolaters, the heathen, were exter- 
minated ; the Jews and Christians, as " the peo- 
ple of the Book," were permitted to live, but in 
the most humiliating subjection and surrounded 
with odious restrictions. For a long time the 
intercourse of the latter with the Greek Empire 
was absolutely forbidden, and the lot of the Ori- 
ental churches in the seventh and eighth cen- 
turies was the saddest imaginable. There have 
been wars innumerable among Christians in the 
name of religion — persecution, too, and oppres- 
sion — but they are against the sweet, mild law 
of Jesus ; whereas, according to the teachings of 
Mohammed, the sacred war ought to be chronic. 
Islam is a national Arabic travesty of some of 
the best elements of Judaism and Christianity, 
elevated to the dignity of a universal religion. 



THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. 127 

It is a poor, weak, grotesque worship, such as 
might arise in the brain of a cataleptic visionary 
and in the midst of a half-savage people. Like 
all national religions, it identifies the State and 
the Church. Its pilgrimage to Mecca, prohibi- 
tion of wine, the veneration of the Kaaba, and 
similar essential points, are no more than univer- 
salized Arabism. And it was the sense of politi- 
cal greatness, of national destiny, together with 
possible demoniac aid, that made its first fol- 
lowers so fanatically brave that everything 
yielded before their awful onslaught. No doubt 
the religious element was not wanting. The 
joys of paradise, the fatalist belief, the personal 
enthusiasm for the prophet, worked wonderfully 
on the desert tribes and helped to make them 
the scourge of Christendom. 

The Christians of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt 
were sadly divided when Islam arose. The 
christological heresies of two centuries had filled 
every rank of society with division and embitter- 
ment. Long-concealed national impulses began 
to throb in tjie breasts of peoples never willingly 
subject to Roman rule. Persecuted heretics 
opened the gates of Egypt and Syria as, two 
centuries earlier, the Donatists delivered up 
Africa to the Vandals. Religious oppression and 



128 THE BELIGION OF ISLAM, 

the civil despotism of Constantinople reaped the 
same reward on the same day, and whole nations 
laboriously won for Christ were for centuries 
lost to religion and culture. Roth Rome and 
Persia were exhausted after more than three 
centuries of irregular warfare, and military valor 
had declined in both States. In the rapid spread 
of the teachings of the prophet we must see also 
a providential chastisement of the discord, in- 
justice, tyranny, and immorality which fill the 
pages of Oriental Church history in the sixth 
and seventh centuries. Endless heresies had so 
disfigured the Christian faith in the regions in 
which Islam first emerged that many might 
be. pardoned for not seeing in it anything worse 
than the ordinary forms of heretical Christianity. 
We must also remember that Islam may be 
meant to serve as a stepping-stone, a transition, 
for those races whose low mental culture does 
not permit them at once to appreciate so intel- 
lectual a religion as the Christian. It has served 
as a bulwark against the Mongol hordes to pre- 
vent any such human flood as that wh^ch Attila let 
loose in the fifth century. The Arab kingdom of 
Spain deserves well of letters and the sciences 
for its services in the eighth and ninth centuries, 
though the origin and the spirit of this literary 



THE RELIGION OF ISLAM. 129 

culture are not to be sought in the depressing, 
intolerant Koran, but in the literature of Greece, 
preserved for them by Christian hands. Medie- 
val scholasticism owes no small debt to the men 
who kept alive the study of Aristotle, and their 
dangerous philosophical heresies were the spurs 
which urged on men like Aquinas and Bonaven- 
tura to plan and execute a successful reconcilia- 
tion of the philosophy of the Stagirite with 
Christ and the Church — a problem that seemed 
an impossibility to a Tertullian. The polemics 
against the Moslem from St. John Damascene 
and Theodore Abukara down to Raymond Lullus 
sharpened the Christian intellect and kept alive 
abstract and philosophical studies where they 
might have died out for want of practical 
utility. It is to this practical need that we owe 
the famous work of St. Thomas, " Contra 
Gentes." 

In another direction, too, the Moslem was des- 
tined to influence Western Christendom. Under 
the best caliphs and in the palmy days of Arab 
rule, the sciences flourished in an eminent de- 
gree. "We find in their literature many gram- 
marians and lexicographers of note, poets in 
abundance and of a high order, translators of 
many important works from Persian and San- 



130 THE RELIGION OF ISLAM, 

scrit, Greek and Syriac^ among which occur 
more than one ancient Christian text. They 
pursued the studies of astronomy and mathe- 
matics with great eagerness, and in their pas- 
sion for alchemy were the forerunners of modern 
chemistry. The Hteratures of Greece, Persia, 
and India found sympathetic admirers at Bag- 
dad and Cordova. History and geography 
flourished, and there is scarcely a century with- 
out some excellent chroniclers, geographers, and 
cosmographers, at a time, too, when the latter 
class of studies was greatly neglected in the 
Christian West, which can only show for the 
same period the small geography of the Irishman 
Dicuil. The commerce of the Middle Ages was 
to a great extent in their hands. They traded in 
times of peace with Constantinople, where they 
had great privileges. Their ships went to 
India and even into the China seas. Their 
caravans went by land from Tangier to Jerusalem 
and from Damascus to the Great Wall of China. 
They penetrated deep into Northern Africa and 
sought ivory and black slaves on the eastern 
coast of that continent. The silks of China and 
the spices, camphor, steel, and precious woods of 
India were poured into their markets, while in 
turn they exported the finest glass, dates. 



THE BELIGION OF ISLAM. 131 

refined sugar, mirrors, and blades of steel ; fabrics 
of silk and gauze and brocade ; figured muslins 
and striped satin stuffs. Tools, carpets, jewellery, 
and trinkets were among the staple articles of 
manufacture. The papyrus, and later the paper, 
used by the Western Christians were the product 
of the Moslems, and it was no small annoyance 
to the imperial and pontifical chanceries to have 
to use writing materials that bore the water 
mark of Allah and the prophet. All the trades 
and industries reached a high degree of prosperity, 
and in every city the retail commerce was repre- 
sented by shoemakers, saddlers, dyers, fruiterers, 
grocers, armorers, booksellers, druggists, per- 
fumers, and a host of similar small merchants. 
The Crusades let down the barriers between 
the Orient and the Occident, and thus the ac- 
cumulated treasures of the former — literary, ar- 
tistic, and social — -became at once the common 
property of mankind. The intellectual wealth 
and the general refinement of the Oriental peo- 
ples could not be withheld from the West, but 
the struggle f<or political supremacy grew all the 
fiercer. From Godfrey of Bouillon to Mark 
Antonio Colonna is a distance of five centuries, 
but it needed all that time to curb the courage 
and determination of the hosts of Islam. It is 



132 THE BELiaiON OF ISLAM, 

the popes to whom belong the chief honor of 
this long and glorious conflict. It was .they who 
saw that a religion of the sword must be fought 
with the sword and who led on the forces of 
Christendom with never-failing courage and pru- 
dence. Charles Martel and Godfrey de Bouillon, 
Richard Coeur de Lion and Don Juan of Austria, 
were the lay leaders of this astounding conflict. 
But in the spiritual background we see the 
figures of the popes of the seventh century 
already concerned with the growth of Islam. 
Gregory IV., in the middle of the ninth, rebuilds 
Ostia as a protection against the " nation of the 
Hagarenes, hated by God, unspeakable," just as 
clearly conscious of the gravity of the situation 
as Urban II., Gregory IX., Pius II., or Pius Y. 
If the modern world has escaped the gloomy 
and cruel bondage of the Koran ; if liberty and 
not despotism, progress and not stagnation, are 
the marks of our society; if the spiritual and 
the temporal have not been hopelessly confused ; 
if woman has maintained the dignity and the 
large freedom to which Christianity has called 
her ; if polygamy, slavery, mutual fanatical 
hatred and armed proselytism, are not rooted in 
our midst ; if we enjoy the splendid masterpieces 
of art and the charms of divinest music; if we 



THE BELIGION OF ISLAM. 133 

have not become the slaves of Bedouin and 
Ottoman — we owe it above all to the Father of 
Christendom, who, by whatever name he went, — 
Gregory, Urban, or Pius, — made it his special 
duty to crush whenever and wherever he could 
the ambitious and stirring successors of the 
prophet. 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 

What do we understand by Civilization ? It 
is usually taken to mean the refinement of 
man in his social capacity. Whatever uplifts, 
cleanses^ purifies^ inspires man as a member of 
the common human family is held by all men to 
be civilizing. The word, if not -the idea, comes 
to us from the masterful Roman people. They 
believed that their civilitas, or civilization, the 
sum total and the spirit of social progress attained 
in their city by their laws and language, their, 
religion and philosophy of life, was unsurpassed, 
was the last and highest effort of mankind. 

In this they erred; and we need no better 
proof than the remnants of their life that have 
come down to us in one way or another. But 
they erred in noble company, for before them 
the Egyptian, the Assyrian, and the Persian had 
shared the same conviction, as they have left the 
same historical proofs of their self-illusion in 
many a great monument, many a proud inscrip- 
tion. Even the Greek, whose civilization is so 
intimately related to that of the Romans, and 

134 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 135 

through them to us^ was unable to protect and 
propagate directly the spirit and the institutions 
of his own admirable refinement. In all purely 
human work there is a response of death, a certain 
futility and emptiness, as a reminder by Nature 
of man's transitory character and functions. 

Nevertheless J while the fori^s, the outer dress, 
as it were, of civilization, change from one 
epoch of time to another, there is forever com- 
mon to all mankind an irrepressible trend, like a 
rising flame or a flowing current, that impels us to 
create and share common interests and common 
enjoyments, that calls forth common efforts for 
causes that are common and therefore higher than 
any or all of us. In the common gains or attain- 
ments we bring to the front the best and noblest 
that is in each one of us. In the common strug- 
gle we learn to admire and love the natural 
forces, gifts, opportunities, and institutions which 
have been the means of creating what each 
race, or people, or epoch calls its civilization. 
So the flag of one's fatherland arouses the holiest 
of natural passions, for it compresses into one 
cry, as it were, the whole life of a great and 
ancient people through many stirring centuries. 
So the tattered colors of the regiment whip the 
blood of the soldier into a rapid flow, for they 



136 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, 

recall the vastness and complexity of the com- 
mon efforts that culminated in the victories 
whose inscribed names are soaked with the blood 
of the bravest and best. 

Civilization is indeed a constant strife, and 
he alone comprehends it well who looks on it 
from the view-poi^t of conflict. Not one genuine 
gain of civilization but counts its martyrs ; not 
one step upward in the history of mankind but 
is taken amid the protests and opposition of 
those whose individual or particular interests are 
assailed, or seem to be. Mankind itself, even 
collectively, is not exempt from the blunders and 
follies, the errors and weaknesses of the indi- 
vidual. A Socrates can sacrifice to Esculapius, 
and a Montezuma can preside over hecatombs of 
human victims. It is precisely this atmosphere 
and character of conflict that lend to the period 
we are about to deal with its greatest charm. 

I. 

In the history of mankind, there is no more 
instructive, no more crucial, time than what we 
call the Middle Ages. Then the ancient civiliza- 
tion of Europe was overrun by the barbarism of 
the North and the East, and owed its preservation 
and resurrection, not to its own power and fasci- 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 137 

nation, not to the pity or needs of rude and fierce 
conquerors, but to the influence and authority of 
the Catholic Church. Roughly speaking, we 
may say that the Middle Ages are that period of 
one thousand years that opens with the over- 
throw of the imperial power of Eome in Central 
and Southern Europe about the year 500 a.d. 
and closes with the discovery of America and the 
invention of printing, just before the year 1500. 
In that time, there is, in greater or lesser degree, 
one form of government,^ the feudal system, 
based on permanent warfare, upheld by a monop- 
oly of the land, and the weakness of the central 
authority in every State. One race, the Teu- 
tonic, imposes its will on all the fair lands that 
were once the provinces of Eome — Spain, Gaul, 
Britain, Helvetia, the Rhin eland, Italy herself. 
Throughout Europe the warrior rules, and the 
public life is marked by all the virtues and vices 
of the camp or burg. With few exceptions, the 
civil power is held by an aristocracy, more or less 
open from below, more or less restrained by king 
or emperor, but always violent and proud. The 
habits and manners of daily life are yet largely 
those of the forest and the marsh and the sea 
whence the invaders came. It was many a long 
day before the English thane forgot that he was 



138 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, 

the son of Low Dutch pirates, or the Norman 
earl ceased to feel himself the descendant of men 
who had made a dozen kings to quake and 
emperors to do them homage. The Hidalgos of 
Spain, the Ritters of Germany, are long conscious 
that they hold their places by reason of the old 
Gothic and Sue vie or Alemannic conquests. At 
the basis of this society there is always the an- 
tithesis of might and right, the strong and the 
weak, the brutal and ignorant against the refined 
and educated, the SQlfish and individual greed or 
need against the purposes and utilities of pro- 
gressive society. When we look out over these 
ten centuries of human history, they come before 
us like the meeting of the turbulent sea with the 
waters of some majestic river, the Ganges or the 
Mississippi. On one side is the contribution of 
an orderly and regulated force, on the other 
the lawless impact of an elemental strength. 
The result is eddies and currents, islands and 
barS; reefs and shoals. A new and strange life 
develops along this margin of conflict between 
order and anarchy. All is shifting and chang- 
ing, and yet, beneath all the new phenomena, 
goes on forever the original struggle between the 
river that personifies civilization and the sea 
that personifies the utter absence of the same. 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 139 

So it was in the civil and secular world of the 
Middle Ages. There were indeed periods of 
advancement, stretches of sunshine in a gloomy 
and troubled climate, individuals and institu- 
tions of exceptional goodness. If the underlying 
barbarism of the civil life had its vices, it had 
also its virtues, that both pagan and Christian 
have agreed in praising. It had overrun Europe 
like a flood, but it brought with it a rich alluvial 
deposit of courage and ambition, the elasticity 
and ardor of youth, fresh and untainted hearts, 
an eagerness to know and to do, an astounding 
energy that was painful to the sybaritic society 
that suffered the domination of barbarism. 

For an event of so great magnitude, it is won- 
derful how little we know of the circumstances 
of the fall of the Eoman authority in the West. 
The civilization that up to the end was heir to 
all the art and philosophy of Greece, all the 
power and majesty of Rome, suffered ship- 
wreck almost without a historian. Odds and 
ends of annals and chronicles, stray remarks 
apropos of other things — these are all that are 
left to us of those memorable decades of the 
fifth century, when Rome saw her gates dese- 
crated by one barbarian horde after another. 
Yet enough remains to show that it was the 



140 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, 

Catholic Church which stood between her and 
utter extirpation, so great was the contempt and 
hatred of Goth and Vandal and Hun for the city 
that had been long, the oppressor of the nations. 
Here a bishop turns away the wandering hordes 
from his town, there another encourages to vig- 
orous resistance that is successful; here a holy 
virgin saves Paris from destruction, there an 
Italian bishop brings home a long procession of 
captives. Everywhere in this dark century that 
saw the old classic life enter on its decline, the 
Catholic bishop appears as the defender of the 
municipality and • the people against every 
oppression. He also possesses a moral authority 
equally great with Koman and barbarian. 
Alone he is trusted by both powers, for he is 
the only social force left that is really unaffected 
by the collapse of the old world and the arrival 
of a new one. The bishop is the ambassador of 
emperor and people, as on that dread day in the 
middle of the century, when Leo the Great went 
out to Attila, on his way to Eome, and persuaded 
the great Hun to turn back with his half million 
savages and spare the Eternal City. As sorrow 
upon sorrow fell on the doomed cities and popu- 
lations, the civil power gave way completely, and 
the ministers of religion were compelled to take 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 141 

up a work foreign to their calling, and save such 
wreckage as they might of the administration, 
art, and literature of their common fatherland. 
They became the premiers of the barbarian 
kings, the codifiers of their laws, their factotums 
in all things, their intimate friends and counsel- 
lors. There is not a state in Europe, and all of 
the'm go back to this time, that does not recog- 
nize among its real founders, the Catholic bishop 
before whom the original conquerors bowed. 
There is Clovis before Remigius, Theodoric be- 
fore Epiphanius and Cassiodorus, the Burgundian 
king before Avitus, and so many others that it is 
needless to detail their names or deeds. I recall 
the facts only to show that the very bases of our 
Christian society, the very foundations of mediae- 
val Christendom, were laid by a long line of 
brave and prophetic bishops and priests, who 
saw at once in the barbarian conquerors future 
children of the Church and apostles of Chris- 
tianity. On the very threshold, therefore, of the 
Middle Ages, the Catholic Church appears as 
the truest friend both of the old order that was 
going out, and the new one that was being ush- 
ered in amid the unspeakable horrors that always 
accompany the downfall of an ancient and highly 
wrought civilization. 



142 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, 

11. 

All civilization begins with the soil. What 
have been the relations of the Catholic Church 
to the soil throughout the Middle Ages ? Ev- 
erywhere man is a child of the soil. Mysteri- 
ously he issues from it. He Hves on it and by 
it. He goes down one day to his appointed 
place in the mighty bosom of Mother Earth. 
No matter how complicated society may become, 
it is impossible that conditions should arise in 
which man can be otherwise than dependent 
upon the earth that God gave him for a suffi- 
cient and suitable sojourning place. Institu- 
tions, laws, customs, and manners that sin 
against the God-given relations of man and the 
soil bear in them always the sure promise of 
death. Half, nay, nearly all the great events 
of history are directly traceable to the struggles 
for the soil, whether from within or without 
the State. The plebeians and the patricians 
of Rome create immortal principles of private 
law by reason of this very conflict ; the Eoman 
State itself goes on the rocks because it 
neglected good lessons learned in its infancy. 
The contests of warlike shepherds in China pre- 
cipitate masses of barbarian Goths and Huns 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 143 

and Vandals on the Roman Empire and dis- 
locate the social fabric that the genius and for- 
tune and experience of a thousand years had 
built up. For another thousand years of feudal 
life the land is the only source and sign of 
wealth. The Middle Ages, economically, are 
that period of Western history when a few 
reaped the products of the earth, when the 
many bore the burden of the sowing, but at 
the reaping went empty-handed away. 

The Catholic Church is too much the Mother 
Church of the poor and lowly and humble, too 
much the Spouse of the carpenter's Son, that 
great Friend of all who labor and are heavy 
burdened, not to hear forever in her heart the 
tender yet puissant cry, "I have pity on the 
multitude." The life of the soil is really in 
the labor that makes it bear fruit. Until man 
appeared the world was indeed a bright garden, 
but growing wild and untrimmed, all its powers 
sleeping as though under a spell within its 
bosom. This labor the Catholic Church has 
always sanctified and held up as a necessary 
and a blessed thing. Her Founder was ac- 
counted the son of a common laboring man, 
Himself a toiler at the bench. Her first mis- 
sionaries were working-men — fishermen, pub- 



144 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, 

licans, a physician, a tent-maker. She, first 
and alone, uplifted on her banner the symbols 
of labor and declared them worthy and holy. 
AH her early documents bear the praise of 
labor. All her earliest legislation enforces 
labor as a duty for all. But the duty of labor 
brings with it a corresponding right to the fruit 
and reward of labor, and here she came at once 
into contact with the existing conditions of 
society. 

I shall say nothing of the relations of the 
Church to the soil under the pagan Roman 
Empire. Those three centuries were not un- 
like the three decades of the hidden life of 
Jesus, an epoch of divine education for her 
public life. But as soon as she is free we find 
her concerned about the treatment of the work- 
ing-man in the great ranches or villas of the 
Roman nobles. No more underground prisons, 
no more stamping with hot irons the face that 
has been cleansed in the baptism of Christ, no 
more compelling of girls to go on the obscene 
vaudeville stage of antiquity, no more maim- 
ing or abusing of the slave. She opens vast 
refuges in every city for the poor and homeless 
driven off their estates by the growing monopoly 
in land. Every church door is a distributing 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 145 

place for the bread of the ensuing week. One 
quarter of the funds of every church goes to the 
relief of her poor. Before the empire fell one 
of her priests arose and wrote an immortal page 
that stands forever to show that it was the 
abuse of taxation that brought it low and not 
the right hand of the barbarian, which in more 
humane days she had always beaten down. 
Economically, the old Roman Empire was 
always pagan, even in the hands of Christian 
men. Its principles and methods of adminis- 
tration never changed. It was an omnipotent, 
omniscient bureaucracy, that learned nothing 
and forgot nothing, until one grim day the 
Cross went down before the Crescent on the 
dome of St. Sophia and the Leather Apron was 
hoisted above the waters of the Golden Horn. 
But in all those trying ages, every bishop's 
house was a court of appeal for the overbur- 
dened peasant, and the despotic lord or cunning 
middleman was very likely to hear in a sum- 
mary way from Constantinople, or from the bar- 
barian kings turned Christian. A bishop sat on 
the bench with the judges. He visited the 
prisons, his church had the right of asylum for 
poor debtors or oppressed men generally. He 
was recognized by the State as a natural-born 



146 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, 

spokesman of the people in city and country. 
He was the last link between the old Roman 
society and the new world arising on its ruins. 
In his person, for he was nearly always the 
ablest man in the city, were gathered all the 
best traditions of law and procedure, of tradi- 
tions and good customs. In the wreckage of 
the State he had saved, as it were, the papers, 
the family records, the registers, and the like, 
that in an hour of peace would enable order to 
be brought out of chaos by younger hands. 
Let any modern economist or lawyer read the 
letters of Gregory the Great and he will be as- 
tonished to see how this great Roman nobleman, 
who traced his ancestry back to the Caesars, and 
who had been himself governor of Rome at the 
end of the sixth century, treats the relations of 
the peasant and the soil. Without interfering 
with the theories of the day that did not con- 
cern him, he upholds in a long series of docu- 
ments the just rights of his tenants on the four 
hundred farms that the Roman Church then 
owned in Sicily. He chides his agents for 
rackrenting and orders the excess to be given 
back. He provi&es for an adjustment of losses 
between the Church and the tenants. He 
writes to the emperor about false measure- 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 147 

ments and exactions. Were all the noble prin- 
ciples he promulgates to be put into modern 
English^ it would be seen that this ancient 
Bishop of Rome had asserted thirteen hundred 
years ago, at the beginning of our modern world, 
the principles that are yet basic in any society of 
men that pretends to stand and work well, with- 
out convulsions or revolutions. Now, Gregory 
was only the head of the system; he was not 
the inventor of those principles. He recalls 
them to his Italian bishops as being the purest 
spirit of the gospel. If we want to know what 
they are we have only to read the magnificent 
encyclical of Leo XIII. on the condition of the 
working-men. In it these principles are clothed 
in language scarcely different from that of his 
ancient predecessor. 

These ancient bishops of the decadent empire 
and the incipient States of Europe compelled 
the great land-owners to build numerous little 
chapels on their estates. Thus arose around 
the homes of religion the little villages of 
France and Italy and Germany. It is no mere 
chance that causes the Catholic Church spire in 
these lands to rise from ten thousand hamlets. 
The hamlets grew up beneath its beneficent 
shadow. In those little chapels were told to 



148 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, 

the noble and serf the truths of the gospel that 
gradually broke down the mediaeval servage. 
Before those little rural altars the gospel was 
first divided into sections as we read it to-day 
on Sundays. Then again yearly the bishops in 
synod taught the parish priests how to com- 
ment on it, how to apply it without fear of 
cringing. To-day it seems a small task to speak 
the truth before all, but one day, long ago, it 
required an abnormal moral courage for the son 
of a peasant to stand up before the owner of 
the great warlike castle on yonder peak and bid 
him cease from vexing, bid him live with one 
wife, bid him stop the rioting and dissipation 
by which he spent in one night the earnings of 
the estate for a year. Behind that poor semi- 
illiterate hind, dressed in the garments of a 
priest, there stood the bishop, and behind the 
bishop rose the powerful figure of the Church 
incarnate in the supreme Bishop at Rome. 
Countless times the thunderbolt flew from 
thence, straight and true, that laid low the 
awful pride and the satanic tenacity of some 
great Frank or some fierce Lombard lord. It 
was indeed the Catholic bishop who saved the 
peasants of Europe from the fifth to the eighth 
century. For three hundred years he was the 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 149 

last court of appeal ; he was the gospel walking 
among men ; he was the only international 
force with power to execute its decrees. His 
cathedral was always in the heart of the city, 
and in its great doorway he sat regularly to 
judge justly and without price. His priests 
were usually the lawyers and notaries of the 
people. And on certain old Eomanesque or 
Byzantine portals you may yet see in marble 
that lovely scene of the episcopal weekly tri- 
bunal. Around his house and in front of his 
church stretched the public square. He was 
the protection, therefore, of the little tradesman, 
the peasant, the pedler with his wares. To 
him came the pilgrim, the stranger, the wander- 
ing penitent. To him the ambassadors going 
east and west, the king on his annual round, 
the great nobles charged with, the administra- 
tion of justice or the collection of revenue. 
And when, after Pentecost, for example, or at 
Michaelmas, he gathered in annual synod his 
clergy from the villages and ranches and villas 
and castles, and stood at his throne, mitre on 
head and staff in hand, it did seem to all the 
assembled multitude, and it was in its own way 
true, that the Sun of Justice was shining among 
men, that every wrong would be redressed and 



150 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, 

every sorrow smoothed over, so far as it lay in 
the public power to do so. It is not for nothing 
that the Catholic episcopate won its incredible 
authority over the people. Such historical phe- 
nomena have always an adequate cause. Right 
here it was three long centuries of intelligent 
and sympathetic protection of the people, at a 
time when the feudal law was a-forming and 
the benefit of Roman law was in abeyance. 

All this time the old conditions of the Roman 
provinces of Europe were being deeply modified. 
Industry had been extinguished and commerce 
paralyzed by the first inroads of the barbarians. 
The east fell away from the west, whose jealous 
kings tolerated little intercourse with Constanti- 
nople. The loi^eliest lands of France and Italy 
went without culture, and soon forests grew 
where palaces had lifted their proud fronts. 
The wild beasts wandered among the baths and 
porticoes and temples of the ancients, and the 
very names of towns that were once echoed 
beyond the Ganges were forgotten. Then arose 
another mighty force of the Catholic Church, 
the monks of St. Benedict. Long while only 
laymen, subject to the local bishop and con- 
trolled by him, they grew very numerous in 
time. Their rule was an admirable thing for 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 151 

the social needs of the day. It inculcated 
equally the labor of the field and the labor of 
the brain, and so during this period and long 
after, all Europe was overrun by the children 
of that good man whose mortal remains repose 
above the rushing Anio amid the sublime sce- 
nery of Subiaco. The Eoman Bishop took them 
under his especial protection, and together they 
formed a religious power that worked for good 
in every direction without any thought of self- 
advancement or any conflict of an unavoidable 
character. They chose usually for a home the 
waste and desert spots of Europe. Soon the 
forest was again thinned out and crops were 
again planted. Priest and brother, the edu- 
cated man and the common laborer, went down 
into the field together, and worked all day in 
silence side by side. They built the ditches, 
they bridged the streams, they laid the neces- 
sary roads ; they increased the area of arable 
land in every decade, and thereby drove out the 
noxious wild beasts ; draining and irrigation on 
a large scale were carried on by them. Walls 
and fences and granges arose on every little 
estate that they had created -out of nothing. 
The peasant, half barbarian, learned from them 
the traditions of old Eoman agriculture, for 



152 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 

these men were often the best born and best 
educated men of the time. They leased to the 
peasant at a ridiculous rent and in real perma- 
nency the soil that they had themselves created. 
His children found employment in their kitchens 
and barns. . One day the parents would lead 
their brightest boy to the abbey altar, where his 
little fist would be wound up in the altar cloth 
as a sign that they gave him to St. Benedict. 
Thus he would enter the order as a novice, to 
die My Lord Abbot of ten thousand acres, or 
Archbishop of Cologne, or perhaps Pope of 
Rome. There is one true source of modern 
democracy — that ever open door of the Church 
by which throughout the Middle Ages the high- 
est honor and emolument were ever open to the 
lowliest and poorest. 

In those old days there were few or no cities. 
With the exception, perhaps, of Northern Italy, 
the old municipalities of the great Roman prov- 
inces, with all their traditions of order and jus- 
tice, had been submerged. The collective life 
was everywhere a tender growth nourished by 
the Church. Its beginnings were often after 
the following f aghion : — 

Over against the castle or burg of the local 
lord she set the little church or the small mon- 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 153 

astery. These, too, became proprietors, and on 
their estates the peasantry could see other prin- 
ciples of government than those of the ra- 
pacious feudal lord. It was an old saying in 
the Middle Ages that it was a good thing to 
dwell beneath the crozier. As a fact, the green- 
est fields and the richest slopes,' the best vine- 
yards, the best kept forests and fisheries, were 
those of bishop or abbot. Here religion forbade 
waste and riot, and education brought to their 
cultivation much knowledge handed down from 
the ancients. Though without wives and chil- 
dren, these great ecclesiastical lords, always 
elective, held a kind of a dead-hand over their 
estates. Thus were secured perpetuity of ten- 
ure, continuous culture of the* fields, equality of 
rents, new tracts of reclaimed lands, mildness of 
administration, and a minimum of expense in 
the conduct of vast properties. The classical 
studies broadened their views and humanized 
bishop and priest and monk. The meditation 
on the gospel, the example of countless holy 
monks and hermits, the daily service of God at 
the majestic altars of some basilica or Roman- 
esque church softened their hearts. Those men 
and women whom the bishop or the abbot 
daily blessed, who brought in their woes with 



154 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 

their tithes, were his tenants, perhaps for many 
generations ; thus there arose a certain fraternal 
intimacy between the most powerful men in the 
State and the humblest serf who delved on the 
hillside or tended sheep along the uplands. 
Whole sections of Europe were in this way 
reclaimed, or' for the first time cultivated. 
Prussia, Southern Germany, most of the Rhine- 
land, the greater part of Switzerland, great tracts 
of Southern Italy and Sicily, of Norway and 
Sweden, are the immediate creation of these 
churchmen. If we would have some idea of 
the duties of a mediseval bishop we should have 
to compare him with the president of some great 
railroad and double that with many of the 
duties of the mayor of a city and add thereto 
the responsibilities of teacher and preacher. 

III. 

The States of the Middle Ages were almost 
purely agricultural. Yet even in such States 
problems of production and distribution arose. 
The population increased, wants multiplied, war 
and travel and awakening knowledge roused 
curiosity and desire. The bishop's house first, 
and then the monastery, was the great nucleus 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 155 

of social life in the Middle Ages. Around the 
cathedral that the bishop built, perhaps in some 
lonely spot, if he was a missionary, or on the 
site of the old public buildings, if he dwelt in a 
once Roman town, gathered all kinds of work- 
men — tillers of the field, the weavers of cloth, 
the builders of houses, the decorators of the cathe- 
dral, the workers in linen and embroidery. Here 
were to be found the stone mason, the blacksmith, 
the joiner, the carpenter, the gold and silversmith, 
every artificer, indeed, for the little community. 
We see at once that all the germs of a city life 
are here. Indeed, this is the origin of a multi- 
tude of European cities. The day will come 
when fierce conflict will arise between the 
bishops and the serfs emancipated and enriched, 
the latter claiming corporate recognition and a 
municipal constitution, freedom from imposts, 
and the like ;' the former pointing to the fact 
that all they had was a benefit of the Church. 
There are some kinds of justice so complicated 
that time alone can grant them. And so in the 
end the bishop lost his control and the cities won 
legal recognition. Similarly, the monasteries 
were centres of consumption and distribution. 
The revival of the cloth trade in England in the 
twelfth century owes very much to the consump- 



156 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, 

tion of black and gray cloth by the monks and 
the nuns, and, indeed, was long in their hands. 
The preservation and protection of the culture 
of the grape, the viniculture of the Middle Ages, 
was almost entirely dependent on the immense 
multitude of churches, chapels, and altars. The 
minor arts, like delicate work in silver and gold, 
in ivory and wood, embroideries and tapestries, 
were kept alive by the constant need of new 
church furniture. 

In those days men lived much alone in castles 
or widely scattered hamlets. The annual fair 
with its products from all parts of the world 
was held under church auspices, about the mon- 
astery or in front of the cathedral. The wares 
of east and west were there hawked about ; the 
traveller and the pilgrim hurried thither; the 
legal needs of the peasants — wills, marriages, 
contracts — were attended to; distant relatives 
met one another ; all the refining duties of hos- 
pitality were exercised. And above it all arose 
the holy and benignant figure of Mother Church. 
The fair was opened with all the solemnities of 
the liturgy, and the fair itself was known as 
" The Mass " of St. Michael, e.g,, or of Our Lady. 
Indeed, the great book-fair of Leipzig is still 
called "The Mass of the Books." 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 157 

Thus, throughout those remote times both the 
cathedral and monastery preserved the germs of 
civil life, that without them would have utterly 
perished, given the general ignorance and bar- 
barism of the lay life. It is to them that we 
owe directly the preservation of all the social 
arts and professions. How many reflect when 
they enter an apothecary shop that it is the out- 
come of the "infirmary" of the monastery where 
the simples and drugs were kept that were 
needed for the use of the inmates or the serfs, 
and later on the peasants of the abbey. The 
monks copied out the old medical manuscripts, 
treasured up and applied much homely domestic 
traditions of a better day, and, to say the least, 
were as useful in handing down Greek medical 
practice as the Arabs were in transmitting its 
theory. Every monastery had its brother de- 
voted to the sick, whose practical skill was often 
very great. While in Italy, both north and 
south, there surely lingered no little scientific 
medicine of the past, in the west of Europe the 
monks were, to a very great extent, the gener- 
ous physicians of the rude and uncultured popu- 
lations ; memories of those days still hang about 
the cloisters of Italy, and those who have lived 
there long remember how often a rude dentistry 



158 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, 

is gratuitously practised by some good Capuchin, 
how often the fever-stricken boy of the Cam- 
pagna throws himself at the entrance of the first 
cloister, how the women of the hamlet get 
from the nuns of the neighborhood the simple 
remedies they need. When we pass by some 
brilliantly lighted window and see exposed Char- 
treuse, Benedictine, and the like, we may re- 
member that these sweetened liqueurs are 
antique recipes of mediaeval monks, originally 
meant for uses of health. Convents still exist 
out of the Middle Ages, like the Certosa at 
Florence and the Carmelites of the same old 
town, that were, and perhaps are yet, practically 
the dispensaries of the city. Indeed, one might 
add a page to the famous lecture of Wendell 
Phillips on the "Lost Arts," were he to recount 
the benefits conferred on the medical sciences by 
the devotion of the mediaeval clergy to the plain 
people. Only the other day, in reading Ian 
MacLaren's touching stories in the "Bonnie 
Brier Bush," I was led to reflect how much 
silent heroism of the same kind was practised in 
the mediaeval times, when a village doctor was 
unheard of, and the only available skill lay 
down in the valley or up on the tall crag where 
the men of God spent their innocent and benefi- 



CATHOLICISM IN TEE MIDDLE AGES, 159 

cent days. Thus, whatever path of history or 
facts we tread backward for thirteen or four- 
teen centuries, we shall always find that the only 
stanch and loyal friend of the poor man was 
the Catholic priest ; that all the useful and indis- 
pensable arts and professions of social life were 
gathered up by him out of the great wreck of 
Grseco-Roman life, or created anew amid the 
turbulence and lawlessness of barbarism; that 
law and medicine found in him a humble but a 
useful bridge by which they were rescued from 
the flood of oblivion and ruin ; that the homely 
utilities of the soil, of food and drink, of clothing, 
the more complicated processes of production and 
distribution, were very largely dependent on him 
in all parts of Europe. At the top notch of his 
estate he was bishop or abbot, at the bottom poor 
parish priest or monk, — but ever he was a friend 
of the people, and he earned their gratitude by 
an anonymous devotion, a nameless self-sacrifice, 
that covered one thousand years of the infancy 
of our modern states and was really their period 
of gestation and nursing. 

IV. 

While the Church was developing among the 
youthful nations of Europe the notion of the 



160 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 

common weal, the higher good of the common- 
wealth, she was also creating another entirely 
new institution, the Christian Law of Nations, 
or what is known to-day as International Law. 
The old Roman law did indeed recognize, grad- 
ually, a certain universal province of general 
rights, but it was only in the domain of private 
law, of the relations between one individual and 
another, such as contracts and obligations, wills 
and judgments, and the like ; of a public law 
applicable to all peoples, higher than all and 
eminently fair to all, it had not the slightest 
inkling, and has left us no trace. Rome 
acknowledged no equal before the bar of man- 
kind. The only civilization that ever withstood 
her, the old Persian, she pursued and harried to 
the death. Perhaps in that dread hour, when the 
grim fanatic Arab arose in his stirrup above 
the prostrate bodies of Roman and Persian, it 
dawned upon both that they would better have 
arbitrated their pretensions, but it was too late. 
On the dial of time no power can turn back the 
solemn finger of history. It was otherwise with 
the Catholic Church in the West. She was the 
mother and nurse of a whole brood of young 
and ardent peoples, full of high and vague 
impulses, naturally jealous of one another, but 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, 161 

also mutually respectful of the great holy power 
that they felt was lifting them steadily toward 
the light. In their infancy their first mission- 
aries had been sent by Kome, and bore aloft 
their authority from the central see of Christen- 
dom. In time one agent of Eome, after another 
appeared to allay the fires of domestic hatred 
and revenge, to put bounds to ambition, to com- 
pel the execution of treaties, to protect the 
injured who were without redress. Often these 
men were of any nationality ; whatever shrewd 
head offered itself, whatever experience of man- 
kind was at hand, Eome accepted. Every king- 
dom and great family in Europe received and 
welcomed these men. Every decade of the 
Middle Ages is filled with their good deeds. 
They represent a central authority, entirely 
moral and resting on personal conviction of its 
sanctity. They appeal to the common law of 
the gospel and the general customs of Christian 
life and experience. They brought to their 
tasks a suavity of manner and a persistency of 
method that the lay world admired instinctively. 
The opposition they could not break down they 
turned. Peace was their object as war was the 
purpose of the feudal world. In time they 
created an unwritten code that governed the 



162 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 

world, the life-giving centre of which was the 
Person of % Jesus Christ in His gospel enlighten- 
ing and soliciting mankind to follow Him, the 
Prince of Peace, to beat the sword into the 
ploughshare. At a later date, Hugo Grotius, 
Puffendorf, and other learned lawyers organized 
in detail this mediaeval institution; but it existed 
in practice long before them, and had long 
borrowed all its certainty of action from the 
Catholic Church. Only forty years ago, on the 
eve of the Vatican Council, David Urquhart 
wrote his famous "Letter of a Protestant to 
Pius IX. /' begging him to declare again and 
formulate the old Pontifical Law of Nations, 
that nothing else would arrest the bloody, in- 
human practices of the slave trade, the opium 
trade, and all the other infamous arts by which 
the strong white races were waging a hellish 
war against the weaker colored ones. Only 
very lately there met at The Hague in inter- 
national conference the representatives of nearly 
all the civil powers of the earth to promote uni- 
versal peace, but the representative of Leo XIII., 
though invited by Russia and ardently desired 
by the Queen of Holland, was not allowed to 
enter. What good can ever come of such pro- 
ceedings? They are fantastic and visionary. 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 163 

to say the least. It is the play of Hamlet with 
the noble Dane left out. A universal peace is 
a mockery so long as religious convictions do 
not dominate the ancient and natural impulses 
of selfishness, public and private, the cruel 
leonine policy of the world from Sargon to 
Napoleon. 

V. 

It is a commonplace saying that there is no 
social progress possible without the recognition 
of authority in the State, and a respectful sub- 
mission to its due and licit exercise. But of 
what avail is all this if there be no habitual 
discipline in the minds and hearts of men ? It 
is the creation of this docile temper, this 
trained submission to just law and custom, that is 
one of the great glories of the Catholic Church. 
The modern world, in as far as it possesses this 
benefit, inherits it from her. A century of wild 
and incoherent efforts to base social obedience 
on any other lines than those she preaches has 
resulted in anarchy, or a practical appeal to her 
to help control the masses from whose hearts 
the balancing ideas of God, future retribution, 
sin, immortality, were driven by every ingenious 
means that could be devised. Neither Plato nor 



164 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, 

Aristotle, neither Zeno nor Cicero nor Seneca, 
were able to establish a code of principles that 
would command the willing and affectionate 
acceptance of all men amid all the changing 
circumstances of life. Only Jesus Christ could 
do that. Hence His gospel is not only the 
noblest revelation of God to man, but also a 
political document of the highest rank, as the 
centuries to come will most certainly demon- 
strate. Throughout the Middle Ages the 
Catholic Church was the sole recognized inter- 
preter of this gospel. Her decisions were law. 
Her comments were final. She did not call on 
men to obey a human will; it was the divine 
figure and will of Jesus that she held up before 
men. It was not by preaching herself or her 
achievements that she compelled the unwilling 
submission of the most violent men the world 
has seen, men in whose blood the barbarian 
strain was still hot and arrogant. Let any one 
read the great " Papal Letters " of the Middle 
Ages, the letters of Gregory I. to King Ethelbert, 
of Gregory VII. to Henry TV. of Germany, of 
Alexander III. to Henry 11. of England, of 
Innocent III. to all the potentates of Europe, 
and the magnificent letters of the nonagenarian 
Gregory IX. to Frederick II., and he will be as- 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 165 

tounded at the richness and abundance of pure 
gospel teaching, at the cogency of the texts, at 
the vigor and apostolic candor of their application. 
Judges and prophets, bishops and apostles, — these 
men speak as man never spoke before. And 
when their utterances were heralded in a few 
weeks all over Europe by the swiftest processes 
then known to man, the innocent looked up 
and rejoiced, the oppressed breathed easier, 
those who hungered and thirsted for justice had 
their desire fulfilled. The tyrant shook on his 
throne and all the ministers of religion felt that 
an invincible force had been infused into them. 
The moral battle had been won ; let gross might 
do its worst. Kings of every nation quailed before 
those dread spiritual arrows; minor potentates 
stifled their evil passions for very fear of Kome ; 
the unholy and impure let go the estates that they 
had robbed, either from the weak or from the 
Church; the usurer lifted his hand from the 
throat of his victim; the orphans' rights were 
vindicated and the widows' portion restituted. 
The holy law of monogamous marriage, of 
one man to one woman, was successfully de- 
fended; kingdoms were risked, and one day 
lost, for the sake of a principle. To all the 
sacredness of life was declared again and again 



166 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 

— ^^ Thou shalt not kill" — neither thy neighbor 
in unjust violence, nor thyself as God's own, nor 
the child in the womb. In a century of savage 
anarchy she declared the famous Truce of God 
that practically prevented warfare for more than 
half the year. Her altars were always places of 
refuge against hasty and unjust vengeance. She 
forbade any one to mount the steps of those 
altars whose hand was stained with the blood of 
his fellow-man. In that long night of storm and 
conflict she was everywhere the" White Angel of 
Peace, everywhere, like the Valkyries, a presence 
hovering over the multitudinous scene of battle, 
but not like them an urger of death — rather 
the vicarious voice of God, His gentle spouse, 
bidding the hell of angry selfishness subside — 
appealing, in season and out of season, to the 
conscience of mankind, its natural probity, 
above all to the love and the will of the 
Crucified One. 

And so her own law grew, — men called it in 
time the Canon Law, — i.e . the law made up of 
the rules and regulations established by the 
authority of the Church. She disdained no 
human help and she loaned her strength to 
many a humane and good measure. But the 
substance of it all is the gospel ; the spirit of it 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, 167 

is one of peace, of friendly composition and 
arbitration where possible ; its very punishments 
have — what was unknown to the laws of man- 
kind before her — a medicinal or healing char- 
acter. Hitherto men were punished as a revenge 
of society for transgressing its collective will. 
Now men are punished that they may enter into 
themselves and be enlightened, and seeing, be 
made to walk as straight as they see ; that is, 
be corrected. 

Think of this legislation gradually spreading 
over all Europe from Sicily to Iceland, accepted 
as a quasi-divine code by all, and one sees at 
once what a stern but enduring discipline was 
imposed on men's hearts. Obedience was hard, 
but it was useful. * It was humiliating, but it 
cleansed and comforted. It was painful, but it 
made men Godlike, since it was exercised to 
imitate and please Him who had first given the 
most splendid example of obedience. The 
Lombard Gastaldo at Friuli, and the Duke at 
Spoleto, the Frank Comes at Tours or Limoges, 
the Exarch at Ravenna, the Herzog in the 
Marches, all looked on and wondered and 
trembled at the popular submission to one weak 
man's will. For the first time moral dignity 
prevailed, and the authoritative sentence of the 



168 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 

successor of the Fisherman had more weight 
than the laws of a dozen kings. This was a 
great step, for it Hfted the administration of 
justice out of and beyond the sphere of the per- 
sonal and temporary into a high and serene 
atmosphere. It made the face of the judge to 
shine with a light reflected from heaven. It 
gave a kind of immortality to every utterance. 
It was like a new stringer laid on the fair and 
holy walls of the temple of justice. The de- 
cisions of one pope were sacred to his successor^, 
and the wicked had the assurance that there 
was no reopening of their career before a tri- 
bunal that had judged them by the. law of God. 
Such an authority, sacred and intangible by 
reason of long and useful services to European 
society, could deal with all civil authorities on 
the highest level. It had nothing to gain from 
flattery and nothing to fear from their ill-will. 
It had known the gloom of the Catacombs, the 
turbulent and selfish fondness of the first Chris- 
tian emperors, the whims and vagaries of the 
barbarous nations turned Christian. It is no 
exaggeration to say that the civil authority of 
the Middle Ages is the disciple of the Church. 
It learned from her the nature, scope, and spirit 
of authority. It got through hqr the most 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 169 

monumental expression of that authority, the 
immortal law of Rome. It got from her a 
higher and more useful concept of punishment. 
It learned from her a hundred uses of authority 
that were unknown before. It learned how to 
temper severity with mildness ; how to restrain 
the ardor of justice by equity and prudence; 
how to insist on the written evidence and to 
preserve the records ; how to surround justice 
with the due solemnity, and to grant to all con- 
cerned those proper delays that are needed to 
prevent the triumph of wrong through error, 
ignorance, or chance. Many of these things are, 
indeed, the legacies of the Roman law of proce- 
dure. But we must remember that centuries 
before the Roman law was taught in the schools 
of Europe it was the law that the Church 'and 
her clergy governed by, and by which they gov- 
erned themselves in their synods and trials. Its 
procedure was made her own from the begin- 
ning and through her entered the chanceries 
and justice-halls of all Europe. 

Whatever was the actual belief of Shake- 
speare, his genius was certainly Catholic in the 
largest sense. He has always the true philo- 
sophic note when he touches her institutions. And 
so his bishops are the embodiment of law and 



170 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, 

order. The principles of justice, the equity of 
war and peace, the nice points that afect the 
king's conscience, are decided by them. In 
" Henry V.," the king invokes the judgment of 
the bishops as to the moral character of his con- 
templated expedition against France. 

" My learned lord, we pray thee to proceed, 
And justly and religiously unfold 
Why the law Salique that they have in France 
Or should or should not bar us in our claim. 

******* 

And we will hear, note and believe in heart 
That what you speak is in your conscience washed 
As pure as sin in baptism.'^ — Act I., Scene 1. 

The whole trend of public opinion in the 
Middle Ages was so overwhelmingly in this 
sense that it would have seemed an anachro- 
nism to have made the bishops of England as- 
sume^ an attitude different 'from what they had 
always held in ages gone by. So, too, in the 
Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation 
that theoretically dominated the political situ- 
ation in Europe, the chancellor of the empire 
was always the Archbishop of Trier, and as such 
was the emperor s spiritual adviser in all that 
pertained to justice or equity in public affairs or 
enterprises. In other words, the great States of 
Europe grew from infancy to manhood under 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, 171 

the solemn and public tutelage of the Catholic 
Church. What is good and lasting in their 
government they owe to her; what is faulty 
and imperfect to their own inordinate ambi- 
tions. 

The greatest public act that could fall to a 
churchman to perform in the Middle Ages was 
the anointing and coronation of a king. It is 
among the solemn acts reserved to a bishop, and 
as such is found in the Koman Pontifical. In 
one of the great prayers said over the new king, 
the Catholic Church has herself given the char- 
acter, measure, and spirit of the civil duties of a 
regent of the people. It is almost a summary 
of her own career throughout the shifting and 
difficult circumstances of mediaeval life. 



VI. 

Such a power as the Catholic Church, deeply 
rooted in history and in the hearts of all the 
nations of Europe, had necessarily a more than 
ordinary influence on the social life of the people 
and the institutions in which it manifested itself. 
I cannot do more than touch summarily on some 
important points. Those institutions that affect 
woman are fundamental in every society. With 



172 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 

an instinct both true and keen, the Catholic 
Church, at the break-up of the old Greek and 
Roman world, set herself to protect the weaker 
sex. It was now a world in which the example 
of the strong and the rich was all contagious. 
Bravely and persistently she resisted the at- 
tempts of the aristocracy from emperor and 
king downward to introduce polygamy.^ As 
the great nobles grew independent they grew 
restless under the restraint imposed upon 
ordinary men and asserted for themselves 
immunity from the law of the gospel. But 
they found in the popes and the Catholic clergy, 
generally, a wall of brass that they essayed 
in vain to overthrow. The history of her 
marriage legislation, of her dealing with di- 
vorce, is one of the proudest pages in the life 
of the mediaeval Church. In every nation of 
Europe the battle had to be fought over and 
over again, and always with the same result, 
"Thou shalt not." We have yet, for example, 
the admirable letters written by Innocent III. to 
Ingelberge, the repudiated wife of Philip Augus- 
tus. They furnish a sufficient commentary on 
the long catalogue of royal matrimonial causes 
that were ever before the Roman court through 
the Middle Ages. The impediments that she 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 173 

placed to certain marriages had each its own 
justification in history, in the relations with the 
civil power, or in that sure instinct of what was 
for the weKare of the people that I have already 
referred to. Thus the impediment of close rela- 
tionship acted very efficaciously in preventing 
the accumulation of land and power in the 
hands of a few families, not to speak of other 
useful consequences. It must be remembered 
that, as to those impediments that she created * 
by positive enactment or by hallowing custom, 
she must be judged from the view-point of the 
times and the circumstances. Apropos of the 
transmission of wealth, had the mediaeval clergy 
been a married clergy, the wealth of Europe 
would have passed to their children, their great 
benefices would have been hereditary, and in- 
stead of an humble class of men rising by their 
own efforts to the highest rank, we should have 
seen the great prizes of the ecclesiastical life 
handed down by the laws of human affection, 
with the invariable decay of every ecclesiastical 
virtue and the spiritual ruin of the European 
population. 

If the Church built high the barrier about 
woman in some directions, in others she left her 
a freedom imknown to the ancients and opened 



174 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, 

to her a career of extraordinary utility. No one 
might coerce her into marriage; the cloister 
was ever open. Only those who know how 
uncertain the perpetual turbulence of the Middle 
Ages made the condition of woman, how sad 
the life of the widow, the orphan, the desolate 
maiden, can appreciate the benefit that these 
holy refuges were to women in this stormy pe- 
riod. Woman governed freely such institutions, 
and when they arose to J)rominence, her posi- 
tion was only less enviable than that of a queen. 
As abbess of a great mediaeval monastery, she 
disposed of many and vast estates and revenues, 
and enjoyed in her own person the highest dis- 
tinctions of Church and State. In marriage the 
freedom of her consent was especially safe- 
guarded ; her position and rights were the same 
as those of the husband, and if she was inferior 
in what pertained to the disposition of property, 
it must not be forgotten that mediaeval life was 
in many respects different from our own, that 
man alone could bear the burdens of life as it 
was then lived. The bishop's court in the 
Middle Ages was another benefit to woman. 
Usually it was the court for wills and testa- 
ments, and well it was, for the bishop was nat- 
urally the father of the helpless and the lowly. 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 175 

Of two other conditioijs of life I shall say but 
one word — the poor and the slave. So long as 
a monastery existed, no poor man could go 
hungry, and the duty of giving to the hungry 
and the poor was looked on everywhere as the 
holiest of all. War, pestilence, famine, worked 
their ravages, it is true, but in ordinary life the 
hungry and starving poor were rare in mediaeval 
Europe. Nor was this accomplished by statute 
law, nor with painful humiliation, but in love, 
for Jesus' sake, because He, too, had been a poor 
man 3 because the poor man bore the hkeness 
and image of the Creator even as his richer 
brother; because, after all, the rich ma^n was 
only the steward of his wealth and not its abso- 
lute owner. As for slavery, the Church did not 
formally abolish it, but it was incompatible with 
her doctrine and life. It gradually lapsed into 
servage; the serf was attached to the soil, a 
great blessing for him. He was often the 
Church's own man, and so he gradually merged 
into the free peasant, very largely through the 
agency of local churches, only too anxious to 
preserve on their lands the same families, with 
their knowledge of the soil and their loyalty to 
the owners. 

As to money itself and its functions, the 



176 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 

mediaBval Cliurch knew not our wonderful devel- 
opment of industry and commerce. It was an 
agricultural world, and money did not seem pro- 
ductive in itself. Usury was the supremest 
hardship for the poor, as it is yet felt in purely 
agricultural lands like Russia and India. It was 
forbidden under the severest penalties, and out 
of sympathy with the multitudes that would 
otherwise have suffered incredibly in a time 
when their little bit of land, their crops, and their 
implements were all that nine out of ten poor 
men could ever hope to own. As to the uses of 
wealth itself, the ideas of the Middle Ages were 
thoroughly humane, even grandiose. Surplus 
wealth was not man's, but God's. The owner 
was the steward, the administrator, and he was 
bound, after providing for the suitable support 
of his own, according to their estate in life, to 
bestow it in other good works. Moreover, 
thereby he could atone while yet alive for his 
shortcomings ; he could further the relief of the 
poor, the weak, and friendless; he could be a 
helper of God in the government of this world ; 
he could root out the ugliest of all social cancers, 
the cancer of ignorance; he could elevate to 
God's glory a noble temple ; he could provide 
the sweet boon of education for those who would 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 177 

never know its uses had not some generous soul 
been moved by such ideas. So common were 
these views that it was seldom a man or woman 
died without making some provision for the 
poor, for religion, for education. These moneys 
in turn flowed back into the community, and a 
perpetual exchange of good offices went on 
between the individual and the institution his 
generosity either created or sustained. So much 
money was given to education in Germany just 
before the Reformation that Martin Luther used 
to say it was almost impossible for a child to go 
ignorant under the papacy. So education, archi- 
tecture, the fine arts, the social needs, were for- 
ever provided for by the overflowing treasury of 
popular gift, and the Catholic people in turn 
escaped the danger of idealizing their wealth 
and hoarding it too jealously against a future 
that they had no means of controlling. Thus, 
for instance, arose countless grammar schools in 
Scotland and England that were so numerous 
before the Reformation that the poorest boy 
could get a classical education in his own town 
and thereby enter the clergy. In Germany, 
France, and Italy, a similar education was to be 
had with almost the same ease, and that meant 
in those days the open door to office, preferment, 



178 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, 

and wealth. Countless associations were en- 
dowed for the care of the poor, the burial of the 
deadj the dowering of poor girls, and the relief 
of every form of misery. If men made money 
largely, they spent it generously and intelligently. 
There was, perhaps, no time in the history of 
mankind, not even our own last few years, when 
men devoted to public uses so large a portion of 
their wealth. Not the least cause of it was the 
Catholic doctrine of the utility of good works 
for the welfare of the soul. Old churches were 
repaired ; new ones were built all over Europe. 
Indeed, both Dr. Janssen and Dom Gasquet 
have shown, not only that the generosity of the 
fifteenth century was as great proportionately as 
that of any other age of the Church, but that it 
was extremely popular in kind, i.e. that down 
to the eve of the Reformation the people gener- 
ally accepted the mediaeval view of the uses of 
money, notably for the common good. Shake- 
speare, who is so often the perfect echo of 
mediaeval thought and temper, puts into the 
mouth of the good Griffith as the best praise of 
the fallen Woolsey that he had built two noble 
schools for the education of youth, — a grammar 
school and a university college : — 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 179 

Ever witness for him 
Those twins of learning that he reared in you 
Ipswich and Oxford ! one of which fell with him, 
Unwilling to outlive the good he did it ; 
The other unfinished yet so famous, 
So excellent in art, and still so rising 
That Christendom shall ever speak his virtue." 

— " Henry Vni.," Act IV., Scene 1. 

VII. 

In the early Middle Ages the sense of the 
common weal was very imperfect. The Wan- 
dering Nations had developed the kingship 
through long and permanent conflicts, first 
among themselves; and then with Eome. But 
we see on all sides among them the rudest and 
most original independence. Here the great 
unity and centralization of the Church were 
as models to the State, that little by little 
arose to a similar concept. We have only to 
follow, for instance, the history of France from 
the days of Gregory of Tours to the foundation 
of the Capetian monarchy, to see how the 
churchmen contributed to the unification and 
sohdarity of that great State. So, too, in Eng- 
land, the separate little kingdoms are brought 
ever closer together under the influence of 
Canterbury, its bishops, its synods, and the 
general unity of ecclesiastical life that was 



180 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 

there constantly visible since the time of St. 
Augustine. The mixed synods and councils 
of the early Middle Ages in England, Germany, 
France, SjDain, were also a training school for 
the lay governors of society. They learned 
from the better educated ecclesiastics how to 
conduct popular assemblies with something 
more than the rude simplicity of their Ger- 
man forefathers by the Rhine or the Elbe. 
They learned, as we have seen, the use of 
written records, the patient sustaining of con- 
tradiction, the yielding to the majority, the 
power of eloquence and learning. But they 
learned something holier still — to look on 
public life from a moral point of view, to 
consider their offices as a trust from God, to 
become familiar with the idea that all power 
was from God and not from their great spears 
and their strong arms. Little by little genera- 
tions of rulers were formed who owned en- 
lightened consciences and listened to them, 
instead of the wild passions that were once 
their sole guides. Far deeper and more im- 
mediate than the influences of Rome and Greece 
on the modern state are the Christian influences. 
These are original and organic, the former 
academic and secondary. Later,, indeed, the 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 181 

common missionary enterprises, the opposition 
to Islam, tke Crusades, bound all Christendom 
together in links of common sacrifice and ideals 
that could nevermore be forgotten. 

I have already called attention to the signal 
services rendered by the Church in all that per- 
tains to the administration of justice, the corner- 
stone of human society. In the preservation 
of the Roman . procedure, the new views of the 
nature and uses of punishment as a ^^medici- 
nalis operatio," in the obstacle that the right 
of asylum set against unjust vindictive haste, 
in the introduction of written evidence, she 
saved some admirable old elements and added 
some new ones to the civil life of European 
peoples. 

The sanctity of oaths was insisted on by her, 
and the utmost horror of perjury inculcated. In 
the great mediasval veneration for the relics of 
the saints and martyrs and confessors she found 
a fresh means of compelling veracity and obedi- 
ence on the part of the wicked and tyrannical. 
Many a wild baron or marauding noble cowered 
when he was asked to swear or promise by the 
relics of St. Cuthbert or St. Columbanus, St. 
Genevieve or St. Martin, and gave back ill-gotten 
gains that a king could not have taken from him. 



182 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 

YIII. 

If we would understand well the Middle Ages, 
we must ever keep in view that in those times 
public life was dominated by two great functional 
ideas — the sense of personality and the sense 
of responsibility. Throughout those centuries, it 
was the universal persuasion that the final end 
of society was the perfection of each individual 
soul, or rather, its individual salvation. Not the 
comforts of life, nor an increasing refinement and 
complexity of earthly pleasures, not the scouring 
of earth and sea to minister to one hour's en- 
joyment, were the ideals of the best men and 
women of those times. Neither did they seek in 
the organic development of the collective unit, 
the earthly society, their last and sufficient end. 
To them it seemed that human society was organ- 
ized, not as an end in itself, but as a means to 
enable men to know, love, and serve the Master 
on this earth and be happy with Him in the next. 
Whatever furthered these views of life was good, 
and all things were bad or indifferent in the 
measure that they fell away from or were useless 
for this end. This is why the great men of the 
Middle Ages are not its warriors, not its legis- 
lators, not even its great priests and bishops, but 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 183 

its saints. In a closer personal union with God 
men found the highest uses and meanings of life. 
It was a temperament essentially spiritual^ mys- 
tic, that forever urged men and women to neg- 
lect, even despise, what was temporary or earthly, 
to aspire to a world beyond the low horizon of 
threescore-ten and the grave. Holiness, a god- 
like purity of mind and heart, thorough detach- 
ment from the mortal and attachment to the 
immortal and the divine, was the keynote of 
this thousand years. 

During this time it is in saintly men like 
Patrick, Columbanus, Benedict, Boniface, Nor- 
bert, Bernard, Thomas of Aquino, Dominic, and 
Francis of Assisi ; in saintly women like Bridget, 
Kadegunda, Gunegonda, Elizabeth, Catharine of 
Sienna, that we must look for the fine flower of 
Christian growth. Since the Renaissance, with 
its reassertion of the basic principles of pagan- 
ism, it has been ever more fashionable to tax the 
Middle Ages with an impossible mysticism, with 
an unjust contempt for the beauty and comfort 
of the human body, with a false view of man's 
relations to the earth on which he lives and sub- 
sists, and the society to which he necessarily 
belongs. It is not my purpose just now to de- 
fend the mediaeval view, other than to say that 



184 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 

they read the gospel simply and candidly, and 
took this meaning from the teachings of Jesus : 
that they were to seek first the kingdom of God 
and the justice thereof ; that they were to imi- 
tate the earthly life of Jesus Christ; that His 
precepts and counsels were preferable to all sug- 
gestions of nature or experience ; that He came 
on earth to reveal a new and higher life, in which 
men should be as free of the flesh and its limitations 
and perversions as God's grace could majie them. 
They read in the gospel the praise and example 
of virginity, the assurance that the figure of 
this world passes away like stubble in a furnace, 
that for every idle word an account should be 
rendered, that the duties of religion and of char- 
ity, the devotion of self for others, were obliga- 
tory on those who would be perfect Christians. 
They were not always skilled logicians, at least 
not until Aristotle got a chair in the Christian 
schools, and they lived more by the heart than 
by the manual of the statesman or the formulas 
of the chemist. Therefore, to be brief, the Mid- 
dle Ages are more a period of noble personalities 
than of popularized science, a time of strong, 
trenchant individualism, when each man and 
each woman leave a mark on the life about 
them. There are those who believe that there 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 185 

is more magnetism, more genuine inspiration, in 
such a world and life than in a period of golden 
but general elevation, when all is mediocre by 
the mere fact that no one rises much above the 
general level. Just so, there are those who be- 
lieve that the rude hard life of the early history 
of our country developed more superior character 
than the cosmopolitan perfection we now enjoy ; 
that the strenuous days of the pioneers brought 
out more virtue than the finished municipal or- 
ganism of the present ; that the true use of his- 
tory consists in the great characters it reveals 
and uplifts ; that one view of the solitary white 
peaks of the Eockies is worth a week's journey 
across the fat plains of the Red River or Manitoba. 
Just because the view of life popu.lar in the 
Middle Ages pivoted on personality, it was 
replete to the saturation point with a sense of 
responsibility. How this affected the relations 
of man with God I have just indicated. It was 
the true source of sanctity, and its prevalence is 
shown by the great multitude of holy men and 
women who meet us on every page of mediaeval 
history and in every stage of its evolution.' 
In man's dealings with society, it affected pro- 
foundly his concept of public office. According 
to Christian teaching all power comes from God 



186 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, 

and is held for the benefit of one's fellow-mortals. 
It is not a personal inheritance, a thing trans- 
missible or to be disposed of by private will. 
Power over others is vicarious, the act of an 
agent, and as such its use is to be accounted for. 
The Church had not to go far to impress that 
idea on the clergy. It was brought out in letters 
of gold in the pastoral epistles of St. Paul, who 
only develops the idea set forth in the gospel. It 
was otherwise with the civil power. The lucky 
soldier who rose to wear the imperial purple 
had no education save that of the camp. The 
fierce Frank or Burgundian noble who had 
waded through blood to the high seat of Mero- 
vingian kingship thought only to enjoy the fruit 
of his courage and good fortune. But they met 
a priest at the foot of the throne who warned 
them that the power was not theirs, but a trust 
from God ; they heard a voice from the altar on 
holydays depicting the true kingship, that of 
David, of Solomon, of Constantine, of Gratian. 
They met at the council-table venerable bishops 
and abbots who discussed all methods from a 
view-point of divine revelation — notably of 
Christian history and the spirit of Jesus Christ. 
There was anger enough at this perpetual school- 
ing, wild outbursts of passion that they could 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 187 

have no peace with these obstinate priests, fierce 
excesses of cruelty and periods of reaction. But 
the Catholic clergy succeeded in stilling the 
furnaces of passion that were the barbarian royal 
hearts, and in creating a public opinion in favor 
of an ideal Christian ruler. And when once a 
great ruler like Charlemagne had risen to incar- 
nate so many Christian public virtues of a master 
of men, his memory was held in benediction by 
all, and, his shadow fell across all the centuries 
to come, blotting out the irregular and bloody 
past, and forecasting the great royal saints of a 
later day — a Henry of Germany, an Elizabeth 
of Thuringia, an Edward of England, a Stephen 
of Hungary, a Louis of France, a Wenceslaus of 
Bohemia. In time, this practical education of 
mediaeval rulers became academic, and we have 
a long catalogue of "instructions" for kings, 
"warnings" for kings, beginning with the golden 
booklet of the deacon Agapetus to his master 
the great Emperor Justinian, and coming down 
over seven hundred years to the fine treatise 
attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas, " On the 
Government of Princes." You will see little 
reference to such in the ordinary histories of 
pedagogy. Yet they have had profound in- 
fluence in. forming royal youth at a time when 



188 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, 

the happiness of peoples depended much on the 
personality of their rulers. Public office was 
therefore a quasi-priestly thing in the Middle 
Ages, a trust, a deposit, and the proper adminis- 
tration of -it a knightly thing, something to 
affect the conscience almost like the honor of 
the soldier or the good name of woman. 

No doubt there was plenty of human weak- 
ness, plenty of hideous contradiction of those 
ideals. But the ideals themselves were held 
up and even realized. Thereby no European 
people could fall into utter servitude morally 
and mentally like the subjects of imperial Rome 
or the millions of bureaucratic China. In the 
resplendent gospel of Jesus Christ, in the self- 
identical and constant teachings of His Church, 
in the great and shining examples of His saints, 
there was a source of self -judgment and self- 
uplifting that could never be quite dried up, and 
which, from time to time, the Angel of Reform 
came down and touched with salutary effect. • 

IX. 

There is a story told of Ataulf, the general of 
the Goths and the successor of Alaric, the con- 
queror of Rome, at the beginning of this period, 
that he had long meditated the extinction of the 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 189 

whole Eoman power, and the substitution of 
Gothic hfe and habits throughout Europe. He 
was held back from this act by the reflection that 
without the laws of Rome he could not think 
of governing the world. Barbarian as he was, 
he had seized the first principle of good govern- 
ment, the creation of laws at once stable and 
equitable, tried by experience and adapted to the 
circumstances of the age and civilization. In 
the course of a thousand years Rome had built 
up such a system — the Roman laiv. Tradi- 
tion, experience, equity, philosophy, religion, 
had contributed each its share, and the emi- 
nently practical and sober genius of the Roman 
people had welded the whole into a fabric that 
yet stands, the admiration of all thinking men. 
When the Middle Ages opened, with the 
military cunning and strength of Rome departed 
and a dozen barbarian nations camped trium- 
phantly over the Europe that Rome had subdued 
and civilized, this law of Rome, the basis of her 
great Peace and Order, the " Pax Romana " that 
she had established, was in the greatest danger 
of perishing. Indeed, it would have perished, 
save for the Catholic Church. By saving the 
law of Rome as her own law, she saved to all 
future society the idea and example, the spirit 



190 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 

and the principles, of social authority in the 
State, such as it had been evolved at Rome in 
the long conflict of peoples and races that kept 
steadily widening from the Tiber to the extrem- 
ities of the habitable world. The homely re- 
publican virtues of Old Rome, the humane and 
discriminating soul of Greek philosophy, the 
vast ambitions of the Orient, the tradition of a 
golden age of equality and simplicity, the pro- 
found knowledge of the average human mind 
and its norms of action, a religious respect for 
distributive justice, a great sense of the utility 
and loveliness of peace and harmony — all these 
are so many visible traits or elements of the 
Roman law that render it applicable in all 
times to all mankind — what St. Augustine 
used to call " human reason itself set down in 
writing." 

This law the Catholic Church through Europe 
elected to live by herself, at a time when every 
barbarian had the rude law of his own forest or 
mountains. Wherever a Catholic bishop gov- 
erned, or a priest went as a missionary, he bore 
with him the fulness of the law of Rome. It 
clung to his person when the civil centres were 
laid desolate, Rome, Milan, London and York, 
Saragossa, Paris, Trier, Cologne. -The law of 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 191 

contracts, the law of last wills and testaments, 
the laws that govern the life of the citizen in 
the walled town and the peasant in. the open 
field, the general principles and the practical 
case-law that Rome had been creating from the 
Rhine to the Euphrates and from the Grampians 
to Mount Atlas, were now in the custody of the 
same hands that bore aloft the gospel through 
the forests of Germany, or uplifted the Christian 
sacrifice over the smoking ruins of the proudest 
cities of ancient Europe. 

It is owing to the Catholic Church that we now 
enjoy a regular procedure in the administration 
of law. Our legal procedure is substantially 
that of the Roman law. The barbarian peoples 
long detested the regular slow order of Roman 
justice. They despised the written proof, the 
summoning of witnesses, the delays, exceptions, 
and appeals that secure the innocent or helpless 
from oppression, and compel even the most reluc- 
tant to acknowledge the justice of condemnation. 
In all these centuries the Church applied this 
procedure to her own clerics in every land, and 
embodied it in the Canon Law that was the same 
the world over, as Roman law had been the same 
the world over. The justice of the barbarian 
was summary, violent, and productive of endless 



192 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, 

vendettas. The terrible German Faiistrecht, the 
Vehmgerichte of the Middle Ages, like the work 
of our lynching committees;, were a last relic of 
what was once universal. After the fall of the 
Roman power, there was no one but the Catholic 
Church to represent the social authority as such 
over against the wild and s.avage feelings of a 
multitude of barbarians, intoxicated with the 
glory of conquest and the riches of the degener- 
ate but luxurious world of Gaul and Italy. 
When Clovisj the founder of the French mon- 
archy, was distributing the booty after a great 
battle, he set aside for himself a tall and precious 
vase. Thereupon a great Frank stepped out of 
the ranks, and with his spear shattered the vase 
in pieces. "0 King, thou shalt have thy 
share," he cried, ^' and no more ! " Clovis swal- 
lowed his wrath. The next year while reviewing 
his army, he passed before his bold contradictor, 
and noticing some negligence about his dress, 
bade him correct it. As the latter stooped to 
tie the string of his shoe, the king lifted his 
own huge spear and drove it through the neck 
of the soldier. Thus a victorious king admin- 
istered justice, and it is typical of what went on 
for centuries through Europe. 

It was the bishops of the Church who induced 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 193 

the barbarians to temper their own laws and 
customs with the law of Rome. And whatever 
laws we study — those of France, or Germany, or 
Spain, or England, or Ireland — we shall find 
that when we come to the line where they 
emerge from barbarism or paganism, the transi- 
tion is effected by Catholic bishops and priests. 
Throughout the Middle Ages all law was looked 
on as coming from God, as holy, and therefore 
in a way subject to the approval and custody of 
the Church. It was the crown of the moral 
order, the basis of right conduct, and hence the 
royal chanceries of Europe were always governed 
by an ecclesiastic, whose duty it was to enlighten 
the king's conscience, and to see that neither the 
gospel nor the spirit of it were infringed. 

The hasty, vindictive quality of barbarian 
justice was long tempered by the Right of 
Asylum, which the churches and great mon- 
asteries afforded. The greatest criminals could 
find shelter there, as in the Cities of Refuge of 
Israel, if not against pimishment, at least against 
punishment without trial or defence. 

On the judge's bench one could often see the 
Catholic bishop, sometimes administering the 
law of the State by order of the king, sometimes 
the counsellor of a soldier or noble ignorant of 



194 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 

law and procedure, sometimes the defender of a 
town or city overburdened with taxes or tributes, 
sometimes the lawyer of the oppressed and the 
innocent. He is the real man of law, the real 
representative of order and justice, and for 
many long centuries the whole fabric of society 
depended on the succession of good and devoted 
men in the hierarchy of the Church throughout 
Europe. They kept alive the sanctity of oaths, 
without which there is no sure justice. The 
latter is based on the fear of God, and only the 
Catholic Church could emphasize that idea in 
those ages of bloodshed and violence. It was 
well that such men feared something — the 
anger of God, the wrath of the saints over 
whose relics they swore, the pains of hell — 
otherwise there would have been no bounds to 
the arbitrary excesses of a feudal aristocracy 
that despised all beneath it, and was ready to 
cut down with the sword any attempt to domi- 
nate it. Let any one read the private lives of 
some Merovingian and Caroling kings, or the 
annals that tell the story of Italy in the tenth 
century and again in the fourteenth, and he 
will see to what depths of impious blasphemy 
the mediaeval man could sink when he once 
lost his fear of the Catholic Church. 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 195 

It was the Catholic clergy who taught these 
barbarians how to administer society^ who wrote 
out the formulas of government, the charters, 
the diplomas, the numerous documents needed 
to carry on the smallest community where there 
is any respect for property, office, personal 
rights and duties. From the registry of fields 
and houses to the correspondence between king 
and king, between emperor and pope, all the 
writing of the Middle Ages was long in the 
hands of the clergy. Thereby they saved to 
the commonwealths of Europe in their infancy 
no little remnant of old Eoman habits of gov- 
ernment, traditions of economy, order, equity, 
that they had taken over from the hands of the 
laymen of Rome during the fifth century, when 
the empire was breaking up every year, like a 
ship upon cruel rocks in a night of storm and 
despair. 

In these centuries the frequent synods and 
councils of the bishops and priests were to the 
world of Europe what our Parliament and Con- 
gress are to-day. The brain and the heart of 
Europe was then the Catholic clergy. In their 
frequent meetings the barbarian could see how 
to conduct a public assembly, the distinction of 
rank and office, the uses of written records and 



196 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, 

documents, the individual self-assertion, and the 
vote by majorities, the appeals to experience, to 
history, to past meetings, totthe law of God in 
the Old and New Testament. He could see the 
stern and even justice dealt out by the ecclesi- 
astics to their own delinquent members — de- 
position, degradation, exile. He could see how 
these churchmen, when gathered together, feared 
no earthly power, and asserted the rights of the 
poor and the lowly against every oppression, 
however high placed. He could see how they 
feared no condition of men, and reproved popu- 
lar vices as well as royal lust and avarice. He 
could see how every order and estate in the 
Church had its right to representation in these 
synods and councils. The day will come in the 
twelfth and thirteenth centuries when civil par- 
liaments will arise — the first germs of the great 
legislative bodies of our day — but their cradle 
will always remain the mediaeval meeting in 
which churchmen, and often the laymen with 
them, laid the first beams of constitutional 
government. 

X. 

When we say that the Catholic Church was 
the principal almost the only educator of the 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, 19T 

Middle Ages, we assert a fact that to all Msto 
rians is as evident as sunlight. To begin with, 
all the schools were hers. Such schools as were 
saved here and there in Southern France and 
Northern Italy out of the wreck of the Roman 
State and Empire were saved by her. Her bish- 
ops, indeed, from the fifth to the eighth century 
were more bent on the defence of the weak and 
the poor than on aught else, on the conquest of 
the barbarian character, the quenching of its 
fires of avarice, luxury, lawlessness. Neverthe- 
less, many were patrons of learning, like St. 
Avitus of Yienne, from whose writings Milton 
did not disdain to borrow more than one beauty 
of his " Paradise Lost " ; St. Caesarius of Aries, 
a patron of learning whose relative, St. Caesaria, 
was one of the first to impose on the nuns of her 
community the copying and illumination of 
manuscripts ; St. Nicetius of Trier, St. Gregory 
of Tours, and many other similar men. But, 
generally, all such men considered that they 
were in a conflagration, in a storm ; the princi- 
pal education was that of their wild and fero- 
cious masters. Let any one read the pages of 
Gregory of Tours in his Ecclesiastical History of 
the Franks, or the charming volume of Augus- 
tine Thierry on the Merovingian kings and their 



198 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 

courts, and he will understand what a great and 
hard task lay before these Gallo-Roman bishops, 
who stood for law and order and civilization, as 
well as religion, against victorious barbarians 
whose veneer of refinement only hid the hottest 
fires of human passion. 

The schools which every Catholic bishop from 
the beginning necessarily conducted, in order to 
keep up an enlightened clergy, were never aban- 
doned. The archdeacon, in this savage time, 
looked after them. They are numerous in Gaul, 
in Italy, in Spain. The classics are studied in 
them, the history of the Christian Church, the 
laws of the Church and the State. Schoolmas- 
ters arose, like Boethius, Cassiodorus, and later 
the saintly Bede, Isidore of Seville, and Al- 
cuin, not to speak of the multitude of Irish mas- 
ters. The manuals and teaching of these men 
lasted in many places fully one thousand years. 
It was not the highest standard of learning, but 
it was all that could be hoped for, and much 
more than the great majority wanted in a period 
of blood and iron, when society was a-forming 
again, and men could seriously ask themselves 
whether one hour of bestial enjoyment was not 
worth a century of study. Side by side with 
the numerous episcopal schools went the little 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 199 

schools of the new monasteries, where the nov- 
ices of the Benedictines, the children of their 
peasants, those of the nobles who had any ideal- 
ism, could and did learn the principles and ele- 
ments of reading, writing, arithmetic, eloquence, 
music, geometry, and geography. The art of 
handwriting was kept up, and the skill of the 
ancients in decorating manuscripts was saved. 
Out of it, as out of a chrysalis, shall one day 
come a Raphael and a Michael Angelo. The 
bishops profited by the good dispositions of 
Charlemagne and other upright kings, like Al- 
fred of England, to inculcate a love of learning 
and to keep alive their schools and the supply of 
masters — no easy thing in the darkest days of 
the Middle Ages, when culture was timid and 
stay-at-home. Much refinement was kept alive 
within the peaceful precincts of the nunneries 
all over Europe. The noble pages of Count 
Montalembert on the Anglo-Saxon nuns ought 
to be read by all. The art of embroidery, of 
lace-working, of delicate handiwork in cloth and 
leather, the skill in illuminating and the cover- 
ing of books, the domestic art of cooking, the 
arts that flourish in the immediate shadow of 
the altar, and those nameless graces of adorn- 
ment that woman bears everywhere with her as 



200 CATHOLICISM IJSf THE MIDDLE AGES, 

an atmosphere — all flourislied in these homes 
of virtue, calm and reserved amid the din of 
war, themselves an element of education in 
Christian eyes, since they upheld the great basic 
principles of our religion — self-restraint and 
self-denial. 

We shall leave to the Arabs of Spain the 
merit and the credit honestly due them for 
their refinement and their civilization at a time 
when Christendom was surely inferior in many 
ways. But the Christendom of the ninth and 
tenth centuries was necessarily armed to the 
teeth against these very Spanish Arabs, in whose 
blood the new tingQ of Greek culture, caught 
from learned Jews and Oriental Christianity, was 
too weak surely to withstand the hot current of 
the desert that surged successfully within them. 
Christianity has what no other religion has — a 
divine power of reform, which is nothing else 
than an uplifting of the common heart to its 
Divine Founder, a cry of Peccavi, and an honest 
resolution to live again by His spirit and His 
principles. It cannot, therefore, sink beneath 
a certain level, cannot become utterly sensual, 
utterly barbarous and pagan. 

The Middle Ages had two schools, wherein 
the individual heart could always, at any and 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 201 

every moment, rise to the highest level — the 
worship of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, and 
the loving veneration of His Blessed Mother. 
The former was a perpetual spring of noble 
conceptions of life, a spur of godhness, an 
incentive to repentance, a live coal on every 
altar, whose perfume penetrated all who ap- 
proached, and attracted and consumed with the 
holiest of loves the very susceptible hearts of 
mediaeval men and women not yet " biases " 
with the deceptions of materialism, yet living 
in and by faith, yet believing in God, Judgment, 
Heaven, and Hell. All the architecture and fine 
arts of the Middle Ages are there. They are 
thank-offerings, creations of love, and as such, 
stamped with an individual something, a per- 
sonal note that disappears when faith grows 
cold. In the "Lauda Sion Salvatorem," of St. 
Thomas, we hear the most majestic expression 
of the influence of Jesus in the Blessed Sacra- 
ment on the daily spiritual life of mediaeval 
Europe, just as the Duomo of Orvieto reflects 
His action upon the hearts of the artists of 
Italy, and the feast of Corpus Christi enshrines 
forever His plastic transforming power in the 
widening and deepening of the Christian liturgy. 
As to the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Middle 



202 CATHOLICISM IN TEE MIDDLE AGES, 

Ages were solicited on all sides by the mystery 
and the beauty of this type. Only once did it 
enter the mind of man to imagine in one and 
the same woman the serenity of the noblest 
matron, the pathos of the most loving mother- 
hood, and the white splendor of stainless maiden- 
hood ! Only once did the heavens bend so close 
to the earth, and leave a human heart glorified 
as a pledge of their love, as an earnest of their 
value and their reality, as a souvenir of long- 
forgotten days of primal innocence and joy ! 
With an unerring Greek sense of order and 
beauty, the earliest Christian artists seized on 
this new, transforming, moulding idea. They 
saw in it something sacramental, something that 
was at once a symbol and a force. Jesus had 
proclaimed that God was love, and His religion 
therefore a service of love. In the Maiden 
Mary that idea of love was tangible, immediate, 
eloquent, in our poor human way. 

True, there was the supreme beauty of the 
Godhead, of Jesus Christ ! But that was an 
original, flawless, essential beauty. It shone 
all too remotely, too sternly and solemnly ; the 
earthly element was there, indeed, but suffering, 
shot through with hideous streaks of sorrow and 
debasement. 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, 203 

But here in this type of the Mother and Child 
that ^ivine love which is the root and the crown 
of Christianity, its sap and support, is brought 
within human reach. We can handle its strong 
fires, as it were, without being scorched or 
wasted by them.^ Between the puissant Maker, 

1 " Rugged and unlovely, indeed, was all that the outward aspect 
of religion at first presented to the world ; it was the contrast pre- 
sented by the dim and dreary Catacombs underground to the pure 
and brilliant Italian sky and the monuments of Roman wealth and 
magnificence above. But in that poor and mean society, which 
cared so little for the things of sense and sight, there were nourished 
and growing up — for, indeed, it was the Church of the God of all 
glory and all beauty, the chosen home of the Eternal Creating Spirit 
— thoughts of a perfect beauty above this world; of a light and a 
glory which the sun could never see; of types, in character and in 
form, of grace, of sweetness, of nobleness, of tenderness, of per- 
fection, which could find no home in time — which were the eter- 
nal and the unseen o<n which human life bordered, and which was 
to it, indeed, 'no foreign land.' There these Romans unlearned 
their old hardness and gained a new language and new faculties. 
Hardly and with difficulty, and with scanty success, did they at 
first strive to express what glowed with such magnificence to their 
inward eye, and kindled their souls within them. Their efforts 
were rude — rude in art, often hardly less rude in language. But 
that divine and manifold idea before them, they knew that it was 
a reality ; it should not escape them, though it still baffled them — 
they would not let it go. And so, step by step, age after age, as it 
continued to haunt their minds, it gradually grew into greater dis- 
tinctness and expression. From the rough attempts in the Cata- 
combs or the later mosaics, in all their roughness so instinct with 
the majesty and tenderness and severe sweetness of the thoughts 
which inspired them — from the emblems and types and figures, 
the trees and rivers of Paradise, the dove of peace, the palms of 
triumph, the Good Shepherd, the heart no longer ' desiring,' but 
at last tasting ' the waterbrooks,' from the faint and hesitating 
adumbrations of the most awful of human countenances — from all 



204 CATHOLICISM IN TEE MIDDLE AGES, 

the omniscient Judge, and our littleness there is 
interposed a thoroughly human figure of , sym- 
pathy^ pity, and tenderness all made up, herself 
the most lovely creation of the divine hands, 
and yet the most human of our kind. 

XI. 

I make only passing reference to the great 
universities of the Middle Ages. Every one 
knows that from Paris to Glasgow, from Bologna 
to Aberdeen, they are papal creations, living 
and thriving on the universal character and 
privileges they drew from the papal recognition. 
Only a universal world-power like the papacy 
could create schools of universal knowledge, and 
lend to their degrees a universal value. I hasten 
to bring out some less familiar views of the 
influences of Catholicism as an educational force. 
There are many kinds of education, and not all 
of it is gotten from books or under the shadow of 
the pedagogue's severe visage. 

these feeble but earnest attempts to body forth what the soul was 
full of, Christian art passed, with persistent undismayed advance, 
through the struggles of the Middle Ages to the inexpressible deli- 
cacy and beauty of Giotto and Fra Angelico, to the Last Supper 
of Leonardo, to the highest that the human mind ever imagined of 
tenderness and unearthly majesty, in the Mother and the Divine 
Son of the Madonna di San Sisto." — Dean Church in "Gifts of 
Civilization »» (1892), pp. 208-9. 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 205 

It is true that the education given by the 
Cathohc Church was very largely for ecclesiastics. 
Still, there was a great deal more of lay educa- 
tion than is usually admitted, especially in 
France and Italy. From the renaissance of the 
Roman law in the twelfth century, laymen had 
the most distinguished careers open to them, 
and as time went on they practically monopo- 
lized the great wealth that always follows the 
complication and intricacies of the law. How- 
ever, the churchmen used their education, on the 
whole, for the popular good. Every cathedral in 
Europe ivas a seat of good government. There 
traditions of justice and equity were administered 
with an eye to the new needs of the times. 
There was learning with charity, affection for 
the multitudes with inherited practice of self- 
sacrifice. Often the only power to resist the 
excesses of feudalism and to insist on the com- 
mon rights of man was the bishop. In his 
immortal tale of the "Promessi Sposi," Alessandro 
Manzoni has drawn with a master-hand the 
portrait of a great bishop in conflict with a 
feudal master. That this bishop was really 
Federigo Borromeo, a near relative of St. Charles 
Borromeo, does not detract from the truth or 
interest of the portrayal. Every monastery was 



206 CATHOLICISM IN TEE MIDDLE AGES. 

a home of the peaceful arts, domestic and 
agricultural. The great educational virtues of 
order, economy, regularity, division of labor, 
foresight, and the like, were taught in each to- 
gether with other useful virtues, like patience, 
humility, submission — those elements of the 
poor man's philosophy that are as useful to-day 
when a Tolstoi preaches them, as they were 
when Christ gave the example that alone makes 
them practicable, and as they will be when the 
hot fevers of our changing conditions have 
burned out, and we settle down again to one of 
those long cycles of social immobility that have 
their function in the vast round of human life, as 
sleep has in the daily life of the individual. By 
its very nature, the details of the popular educa- 
tion of the Middle Ages escape us. There are no 
written annals for the poor and the lowly. Yet 
all over Europe there went on daily a profitable 
education of the masses as to their true origin 
and end, the nature value and uses of life, the 
nature and sanctity of duty, calling, estate. 
Every church was a forum of Christian politics, 
where the people were formed easily and regularly 
by thousands of devoted parish priests, whose 
names are written in the Book of Life, who 
walked this earth blamelessly, and who were 



CATHOLICISM IN THE' MIDDLE AGES, 207 

the true schoolmasters' of European mankind in 
the days of its infancy and first helpless youth. 
Let any one read " Ekkehard/' the noble historical 
romance of Victor Scheffel, and the still nobler 
poem of Weber, " Dreizehnlinden/' and he will 
see, done by two hands of genius, the process 
that is otherwise written in all the chronicles and 
laws of Europe, in all its institutions, and the 
great facts of its history as far as they affect the 
interests of the people. The countless churches, 
chapels, oratories, were like so many open 
museums and galleries, where the eye gained a 
sense of color and outline, the mind a wider 
range of historical information, and the heart 
many a consolation. They were the books of 
the people, fitted to their aptitudes, located where 
they were needed, forever open to the reaper in 
the field, the tired traveller on his way, the 
women and children of the village or hamlet. 
They were so many silent pulpits, out of which 
the loving Jesus looked down and taught men 
from His cross, from His tabernacle, the true 
education of equality, fraternity, patience — all 
healing virtues of His great heart. 

From Otranto to Drontheim, from the Hebrides 
and Greenland to the Black Sea, there went on 
this effective preaching, this largest possible edu- 



208 CATHOLICISM m THE MIDDLE AGES, 

cation for real life. In it whole peoples were 
the pupils, and the Catholic Church was the 
mistress. When it was done, out of semi- 
savages she had made polite and industrious 
nations ; out of ignorant and brutal warriors 
she had made Christian knights and soldiers; 
out of enemies of the fine arts and their rude 
destroyers she had made a new world of most 
cunning artificers and craftsmen; out of the 
scum and slime of humanity that the Eoman 
beat down with his sword and the Greek drew 
back from with horror, she had made gentle- 
men like Bayard and ladies like Blanche of 
France and Isabel of Castile. 

In the history of mankind this was never 
seen before, and will, perhaps, never be seen 
again. How was the wonder accomplished 
that the Slav, dreamy and mystical, should 
feel and act like the fierce and violent Teuton ; 
that the highly individual and romantic Keltic 
soul should suffer the yoke of Roman order and 
discipline? How came it about that all over 
Europe there was a common understanding as 
to the principles of life, of mutual human rela- 
tions, of the dealings of one society with an- 
other? How could it be that the word of an 
aged man at Rome should be borne with the 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 209 

swiftness of the wind to every little churcli, 
to every castled crag, to >every forgotten ham- 
let and remote valley of the Alps or the Pyre- 
nees, and be listened to with reverence and 
submission? How was this absolute conquest, 
for conquest it was, of the human heart ac- 
complished ? Very largely by the Liturgy of 
the Catholic Church. It was a conquest of 
prayer, the public prayer of the Catholic 
Church. This organized worship of God lies 
at the basis of all European civilization, and 
it is the just boast of Catholicism, that such as 
it is, it is her work. When we take up a 
Roman Missal, we take up the book that 
more than any other transformed the world 
of barbarism. In it lie the ordinary public 
worship of the Catholic Church, the service 
of the Mass, the gospels broken up into short 
paragraphs, the marrow of the life-wisdom of 
the Old Testament, the deposit of world-ex- 
perience that her great bishops and priests had 
gained, profound but true comments of the 
Church herself, hymns of astonishing beauty, 
tenderness, and rapture, prayers that are like 
ladders of light from the heart of man to the 
feet of his Maker. It is this public prayer that 
ensouled every church, from the wooden chapels 



210 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 

of Ireland or Norway to the high embossed roof 
of Westminster or Cologne. This prayer first 
inflamed the heart of the priest^ and put into 
his month a tongue of irresistible conviction, 
and, therefore, of unction and eloquence. After 
all, it was nothing but the Scripture of the Old 
and the New Testament; but it was the Scripture 
announced, spoken, sung, preached; the Scrip- 
ture appealing to the public heart with every art 
that man was capable of using to make it triumph. 
There was never a more profound historical error 
than to imagine that the Middle Ages were igno- 
rant of the Scriptures. Let any one who yet 
labors under the delusion read the epoch-making 
book of two learned writers, Schwarz and Laib, 
on the Poor Man's Bible in the Middle Ages. 

So there grew up the concept of solidarity, of 
a Christian people bound together by ties holier 
and deeper than race, or tongue, or nationality, 
or human culture could create — a sense of mu- 
tual responsibility, a public conscience, and a 
public will. Wliat is known as public opinion 
is in reality a mediaeval product, for then first 
the world saw all mankind, of Europe at least, 
possessed of common views and conscious of 
their moral value and necessity. 

In so far as public opinion is an educational 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 211 

force, it is the result of those frequent appeals 
that the clergy of the Middle Ages made to a 
higher law and a higher order of ideas than hu- 
man ingenuity or force could command — it is 
the result of a thousand conflicts like those about 
royal marriages and divorces that at once rise to 
a supernatural level, of as many dead-locks like 
that between Henry IV. of Germany and Gregory 
YII., where the independence, the very existence, 
of the spiritual power was at stake. The only 
weapons of the Church were moral ones, popular 
faith in her office and her rights, universal popu- 
lar respect for her tangible and visible services, 
popular affection for her as the mystical Bride 
of Christ, a popular conviction that she alone 
stood between armed rapacity and the incipient 
liberties of the people. 

XII. 

There is a very subtle and remarkable educa- 
tional influence of the Catholic Church that is 
not often appreciated at its full value — I mean 
her share in the preservation and formation of 
the great modern vernaculars, such as English, 
German, Irish, the Slavonic tongues. Even 
languages like French, Italian, and Spanish, 



212 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 

the Romance tongues, formed from the every- 
day or rustic Latin of the soldiers and the 
traders of Rome, her peasants and slaves, owe a 
great deal to the affection and solicitude of the 
Church. In all these tongues there was always 
a certain amount of instruction provided for the 
people. The missionaries had to learn them, 
to explain the great truths in them, and to 
deal day by day with the fierce German, the 
turbulent Slav, the high-spirited Kelt. It has 
always been the policy of the Catholic Church 
to respect the natural and traditional in every 
people so far as they have not gotten utterly 
corrupted. From Caedmon down, the earliest 
monuments of Anglo-Saxon literature are nearly 
all ecclesiastical, and all of it has been saved by 
ecclesiastics. The earliest extensive written 
monument of the German tongues is the famous 
Heliand or paraphrase of the gospel, all imbued 
with the high warlike spirit of the ancient 
Teutons. All that we have of the old Gothic 
tongue, the basis of German philology, has come 
down to us through the translation of the Bible 
by the good Bishop Ulfilas out of the Vulgate 
into Gothic, or from the solicitude of St. Colum- 
banus and his Irish companions to convert the 
Arian Goths of Lombardy. These languages 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 2l^ 

were once rude and coarse ; they got a liigh 
content, the thought of Greece and Kome, 
through the Catholic churchman. They took 
on higher and newer grammatical forms in the 
same way. Spiritual ideas entered them, and 
a whole world of images and linguistic helps 
came from a knowledge of the Scriptures that 
were daily expounded in them. Through the 
Old Testament the history of the world entered 
these tongues as explained by Catholic priests. 
Their pagan coarseness and vulgarity were 
toned down or utterly destroyed. St. Patrick 
and his bishops and poets, we are told, exam- 
ined the Brehon Law of the Irish and blessed 
it, except what was against the gospel or the 
natural law. Then he bade the poet Dubtach 
put a thread of verse about it, that is, cast it 
into metrical form. The first Irish mission- 
aries in Germany, like St. Gall and St. Kilian, 
spoke to the people both in Latin and in Ger- 
man, and it is believed that the first German 
dictionary was their work, for the needs of 
preaching and intercourse. Some shadow of 
the majesty of Rome thus fell upon the modern 
tongues from the beginning, some infusion of 
the subtleness and delicacy of the Greek mind 
fell to their lot. The mental toil and victory 



214 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES, 

and glory of a thousand years were thus saved, 
at least in part. The Catholic Church was the 
bridge over which these great and desirable 
goods came down in a long night of confusion 
and disorder. The great epics of France and 
Germany, the Chansons de Geste, were saved 
in the monasteries or with the connivance of 
monks, to whom the wandering singers were 
very dear in spite of their satire and free 
tongues. The " Chanson de Eoland," the " Lied 
of the Nibelungs/' the " Lied of Gudrun," the 
great Sagas and Edda of the Northland, owe 
their preservation and no little of their content, 
color, and form, to the interest of monks and 
churchmen in the saving of old stories, old 
fables, and old genealogies, especially after 
the first period of national conversion had gone 
by. We have yet in Irish a lovely tale, the 
" Colloquy of Ossian with St. Patrick," in which 
the average sympathy of the Old Irish cleric for 
the relics of the past and his just sense of their 
spirit and meaning are brought out very vividly 
and picturesquely. 

It is in the Romance languages that the 
noble institution of chivalry that L^on Gau- 
tier has so perfectly described found its best 
expression ; that the roots of all modem poetry 



CATHOLICISM IJST THE MIDDLE AGES. 215 

that will live are now known to lie; that the 
introspective and meditative phases of the 
literary spirit first showed themselves on a 
large scale ; that the intensely personal note of 
Christianity comes out quite free and natural, 
unattended by that distracting perfection of 
form that the classic Latin and Greek could 
not help offering; that purely personal virtues 
like courage, honor, loyalty in man, fidelity, 
tenderness, gentleness, moral beauty in woman, 
are brought out as the highest natural goods 
of life, in contradiction to the Greek and 
Koman who looked on the great political vir- 
tues and the commonwealth, the State itself, as 
the only fit ideals of humanity. Thereby, to 
say the least, they excluded the weaker sex 
from its due share in all life and from public 
recognition of those excellencies by which alone 
it could hope to shine and excel. One day the 
labor of ages blossomed in a perfect and centen- 
nial flower, the " Divina Commedia " of Dante, 
that has' ten thousand roots in the daily life, 
the common doctrine and discipline of the 
Catholic Church, and remains forever an unap- 
proachable document of the mediaeval genius, 
indeed, but also the immortal proof of how 
thoroughly the Catholic Church had educated 



216 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 

the popular mind and heart in all that was 
good, true, and worthy of imitation, in antiquity 
as well as in the history that then as now men 
were making from day to day. He was con- 
scious himself that heaven and earth had built 
up the poem in his great heart. Perhaps he 
was also conscious that God was making of him 
another Homer, another Yergil, out of whose 
glorious lines all future ages should, even de- 
spite themselves, drink a divine ichor — the 
spirit of Jesus Christ as exemplified in Cathol- 
icism. 

xin. 

Under the aegis of this extraordinary power 
of the Church, there grew up a common mental 
culti^e, based on religion and penetrated with its 
spirit. There was one language of scholarship 
and refinement — the Latin — that often rose to 
a height not unworthy of its original splendor. 
Something common and universal marked all the 
arts, and the workman of Italy or Germany 
might exercise his craft with ease and profit in 
England or Spain. Within the Catholic fold 
the freedom of association was unlimited, not 
only for religious purposes, but for all economic 
and artistic ones as well. Human energy es- 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 217 

sayed every channel of endeavor, and in some, 
notably in architecture, has never soared so high 
in the centuries that followed. 

One result of this solidarity of thought and 
purpose was the creation of what we call the 
Wester 71 mind and spirit, a complex ideal view 
of life that differs from the past views of Greek 
and Koman, as it is in many respects opposed 
to the life-philosophy of the Eastern world. 
Human liberty and equality, hopefulness in 
progress, a spirit of advance, of self-reliance — 
an optimism, in other words — are among its 
connoting marks. All this is older and deeper 
than anything of the last three or four centuries. 
It was in the Catholic Italian Columbus, ventur- 
ing out upon the unknown ocean, and his Portu- 
guese predecessors, in the Conquistadori, in the 
endless attempts to penetrate China and the 
East from Marco Polo and the Franciscan mis- 
sionaries down, in the Crusaders, in the long and 
successful resistance of Hungary, Poland, and 
Austria to the advance of Islam. Here, indeed, 
the Western world owes a debt of gratitude to 
those who arrested the teachings and the spirit 
of the camel-driver of Mecca. No one saw bet- 
ter than the bishops of Rome that the world 
might not stand still ; that the eternal antithesis 



218 CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 

of the East and West was on again; that the 
fierce impact of Islam breaking against the walls 
of Constantinople was nothing in comparison with 
its boglil^e encroachments at every point of con- 
tact with Europe. It is a pathetic tale — their 
tears, implorings, and objurgations. Something 
they accomplished. But if the Oriental problem 
is still quivering with life ; if Western civiliza- 
tion, that is in all essentials Catholic civilization, 
has to go again at the mighty task — but this 
time from the setting sun instead of from Jeru- 
salem and St. Jean d'Acre — it is because one 
day, shortly after the fall of Constantinople in 
1452, the powers of Europe left the Bishop of 
Rome at Ancona call on them in vain to go out 
with the little pontifical fleet and retake from 
the unspeakable Turk the city of Constantino- 
ple. Pius II., not the kings of Europe, was the 
real statesman, as every succeeding decade shows. 
However, the popes estopped the fatalism and 
dry rot of Islam from the possession of the 
Danube; they loaned indirectly to the Grand 
Dukes of Muscovy the strength out of which 
they one day carved the office of Czar; their, 
influence was felt in all the Balkan peninsula ; 
their city was the one spot where an intelligent 
and disinterested observation of events by the 



CATHOLICISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 219 

Golden Horn went on. Better, after all, a thou- 
sand times, a Europe torn by domestic religions 
dissension, than a Europe, perhaps an America, 
caught in the deadly anaconda-folds of Islam, 
that never yet failed to smother all mental and 
civil progress, and has thereby declared itself the 
most immoral of all religious forces known to 
history ! 

XIY. 

Other phases there are of Catholicism as a 
plastic formative power in the life of the peoples 
of Europe, as the creator of their distinctive in- 
stitutions ; they may come up for brief notice at 
another time. Thus, the institution of chivalry, 
with its mystic idealization of woman ; the ever- 
increasing authority and influence of woman 
herself; the honor of saintly character, essen- 
tially, like woman, unwarlike; the function of 
the pilgrim, the monk, the papal envoy, as dis- 
seminators of general views and principles ; the 
publication of great papal documents, with their 
lengthy arguments ; the multitude of friars draw- 
ing their office and authority from a central 
source* and upholding its prestige at every 
village cross; the history of the Church as 
related from ten thousand pulpits ; the genuine 



220 CATHOLICISM IN TEE MIDDLE AGES, 

influence of the great festivals, general and 
local ; the public penances ; the frequent strik- 
ing renunciation of high office and worldly com- 
forts ; the frequent reformation of manners ; 
the increasing use of objects of piety, of the fine 
arts, as a spur or a lever for devotion — all these 
and other agencies were everywhere and at once 
at work, and helped to give the mediaeval life 
that intense charm of motion, color, and variety 
that every student of history must always find 
in it. 



THE CHRISTIANS OF ST. THOMAS. 

According to very venerable legends the 
gospel was preached m Southern India by the 
Apostle St. Thomas. The, ancient Acts of St. 
Thomas relate in minute detail his journeys in 
farther India, and the critics Cunningham, 
Gutschmid, and Sallet have recognized in several 
of the royal names mentioned in these semi- 
Gnostic legends those of actual Indian rulers 
contemporary with the apostle. It is certain 
that previous to 535 a.d. the Christian traveller 
Cosmos Indicopleustes foimd Christian com- 
munities in three places in India — Ceylon, 
Meliapore, and Kaljani (north of Bombay). 
There is nothing, therefore, extraordinary in the 
claim of the Malabar Christians that they were 
first converted by St. Thomas. For centuries 
they have shown his great sepulchre on Mount 
St. Thomas, in the suburbs of Madras, though it 
is claimed by many that his body was eventually 
translated to Edessa, in Mesopotamia. He is 
said to have founded seven churches on the 
Malabar coast, and to have penetrated as far as 



222 THE CHEISTIANS OF ST. THOMAS, 

Madras, where he converted Sagan, the king of 
the country. A column used to be shown at 
Quilon, on the Malabar coast, said to have been 
erected by St. Thomas. He died by the hand of 
a Brahmin, who pierced him with a lance as he 
was praying on the mountain which bears his 
name. Philostorgius relates that a certain 
Arian bishop, Theophilus, was sent about 340 
A.D. to the ^^ innermost parts of India," and a 
local tradition of long standing on the Malabar 
coast places at this epoch (345 A.D.) the mission 
to India of the famous Mar Thomas Cama, or 
Cana, who is described by some as an Armenian 
merchant, by others as a Canaanite, or as a 
native of Jerusalem. It was precisely the period 
when Sapor II. persecuted most . cruelly the 
Christians of Persia. 

The Christian communities of India are in any 
case of very ancient origin. Before the end of the 
second century Christianity was spread over the 
neighboring Persia or the ancient Parthia. At 
the same time the Christians had at Edessa a 
powerful and intelligent propaganda, which 
could not overlook the extreme Orient. The 
trade caravans going and coming, the Hellenic 
influences yet working since the death of 
Alexander, the ubiquitous Jewries, made the in- 



THE CHRISTIANS OF ST. THOMAS. 223 

troduction of Christianity into farther India a 
natural and easy undertaking. Whoever was 
the first apostle of the Malabar Christians, the 
churches of Syria and Persia carried on the 
work. They call themselves yet Suriani or 
Syrians. The Syriac tongue is their liturgical 
language ; they use the Syriac version of the 
Scriptures ; they follow the Syro-Chaldaic rite ; 
and they adopted the heresy of Nestorius from 
the fugitive Syrians and Persians of the fifth and 
following centuries. Besides the continuous 
tradition, local monuments confirm the antiquity 
of the Christian religion in India ; crosses, 
symbolic images of the Trinity, inscriptions in 
Pahlavi, whose contents are as old as the fifth 
century, bear witness to a once flourishing state 
of Christianity. Being outside of the Roman 
Empire, our ordinary authorities know little of 
them. Yet the mediaeval Christians never for- 
got their existence. We learn from the Saxon 
Chronicle and other sources how Alfred the 
Great sent presents to them about the end of the 
ninth century, and how Swithelm, Bishop of 
Sherburne, bearer of the roy^l alms, brought 
back to the king Oriental pearls and aromatic 
liquors. The early Italian missionaries of the 
fourteenth century were surprised to find Christian 



224 THE CRBISTIANS OF ST. THOMAS, 

communities in the Malabar cities regarded as 
socially equal to the Brahmins and holding high 
positions in the State. 

Marco Polo heard of them at the end of the 
thirteenth century, and mentions the little 
church of St. Thome, yet in existence in the 
town of the same name near Madras. Since the 
year 1500 the Portuguese have cultivated most 
intimate relations with this peculiar people. 
These early European discoverers were astonished 
to find Christian settlements at the end of the 
world, with pilgrimages, pious hymns, and, 
above all, an ecclesiastical architecture quite 
different from the pagoda style of the Indian 
temples. Their little churches, scattered here 
and there in the mountainous interior, have 
steep roofs, unknown elsewhere in India, ogee 
arches, buttresses, choirs ornamented with wooden 
sculptures, altars, and the like. They are fre- 
quently built of the indestructible teak wood, 
and remind one of the ancient wooden churches 
of Ireland, England, and Norway. It is clear 
that the models of these churches were not 
Indian, but Syro-Byzantine structures — just 
such buildings as those to which we owe the 
earliest dawnings of Gothic architecture. The 
Christians of St. Thomas possessed only the sac- 



THE CHRISTIANS OF ST. THOMAS. 225 

laments of baptism, eucharist, and orders when 
they were discovered^ by the Portuguese. That 
of penance was unknown to them, but they 
venerated the relics of the saints, and had 
pilgrimages, especially to the grave of St. 
Thomas, the holiest spot in the remote Orient. 
They kept the Scriptures in the churches only, 
blessed holy water by dissolving in it some earth 
from the sepulchre of their apostle, made the 
sign of the cross from left to right, laid great 
stress on the blessings of their priests or Cassan- 
ars, and used no vestments save a long linen 
garment at the celebration of Mass, for which 
they employed cocoa wine and bread mixed with 
oil and salt. They had an intense veneration 
for the holy cross, which even yet plays a great 
part in their domestic and social lives, but did 
not venerate other images. 

Their priests were ignorant, simoniacal, and 
fanatically national and local in their views. 
During the sixteenth century many efforts were 
made to bring these interesting people into the 
Koman fold, to make them abandon their Nes- 
torian heresy and adopt the rites and language 
of the Western Church. A seeming success was 
obtained in 1599 at the Synod of Diamper, 
and the seventy-five parishes and two thousand 



226 THE CHBISTIANS OF ST, THOMAS, 

churches were finally incorporated with the Catho- 
lic communion. Since then their Catholic bishops 
are of the Latin rite, though the clergy is native. 
In the course of the seventeenth century national 
feeling, dislike of the Portuguese habits and juris- 
diction, the intrigues of Oriental schismatics and 
Dutch traders, aroused much bitterness in these 
venerable little communities. The Carmelites 
took charge of the mission about 1663, and did 
much to restore harmony and union with Rome, 
though they could not heal the great schism 
which had taken place ten years earlier, and 
which lasts to this day among .the Jacobite 
Christians of the territory. The unhappy con- 
flicts between the popes and the Portuguese 
hierarchy of India in the latter half of the 
seventeenth century, and the grave troubles 
arising from the discussion of the Malabar cus- 
toms in the eighteenth, were not calculated to 
edify the Christians of St. Thomas, always more 
or less restless under a foreign and Western 
yoke. But the large freedom enjoyed by the 
Catholic missionaries since the British conquest 
of India has produced its results, and the influ- 
ence of the Roman Church is spreading once 
more among these most ancient of Christian 
communities. The diocese of Cranganore, estab- 



THE CHRISTIANS OF ST. THOMAS. 227 

lished in 1605 for their spiritual direction, was 
suppressed in 1838 by Gregory XVI. This was 
one of the many griefs which brought about 
the schism of Goa. Since then they have been 
governed by vicars apostolic, not without inter- 
ference on the part of the Goan clergy. In 
1887 Leo XIII. established two new vicariates 
for the Syro-Malabar Catholic population, which 
is now about 210,000, with nearly 400 native 
clergy and 340 churches and chapels. The 
vicars apostolic are bishops of the Latin rite, 
but each is bound to have a vicar general of the 
Syro-Malabar rite. There were lately 160,000 
adhering to the Monophysite heresy, which 
they adopted in the seventeenth century in lieu 
of Nestorianism, and some 30,000 who cling to 
the Mellusian schism caused by the Vatican 
Council. 

The Christians of St. Thomas have preserved 
their unity and independence by a severe church 
discipline. The weapon of excommunication is 
seldom used in vain. They retain the most 
tender of ancient Christian customs — the Agape 
or love-feast. On great feasts and solemn occa- 
sions a simple banquet is eaten in the church 
by all the people, and the missionaries delight 
in describing the piety and recollection then 



228 THE CHRISTIANS OF ST, THOMAS, 

exhibited. They perform public penance, as in 
the earlier days of the Church, give abundantly 
of their means to religion, practise evangelical 
charity, and, at least in the interior, maintain a 
great purity of manners. The young girls are 
always dowered either by the community or the 
church. Their government is that of a tribu- 
tary republic, or rather a theocratic democracy. 
Formerly they constituted a high caste. The 
jewellers, metal-workers, and carpenters appealed 
to them as their natural protectors. They alone 
shared with the Brahmins and Jews the privi- 
lege of travelling on elephants. They live by 
agriculture and fishery. Many are dealers in 
cocoa, spices, and the like. The Zamorin or 
ruler of the country esteems them highly for 
their bravery, intelligence, and sprightly char- 
acter. The very ancient Peramal dynasty of 
Malabar caused the privileges of the Christians 
of St. Thomas to be engraved on six bronze 
tablets, which were shown at the famous synod 
of Diamper. Later they were lost by fault of 
the Portuguese, only to be rediscovered in 1807 
after the capture of Cochin. They are now 
kept at Cottayam, but copies of them are in 
the University Library of Cambridge. 

The sad but charming 'story of the Malabar 



THE CHBISTIANS OF ST. THOMAS. 229 

Christians is told in many books. The original 
documents may be found in Assemani's " Bibli- 
otheca Orientalis/' while the details of their 
later history are well related by the Carmelite 
Fathers Yincenzo Maria and Paulinus of St. 
Barthelemy, as well as by La Croze and Ger- 
mann, from a hostile view-point. Carl Ritter 
has collected a multitude of details in his great 
geographical work on Asia, and the missionary 
reviews and bulletins of our own century con- 
tain much that is of interest concerning a Chris- 
tian people whose unbroken lineage dates back 
to the time of Constantine the Great and the 
Council of Nice, if not to the apostolic age, 
when the sound of the fishermen's voices went 
out into every land. 



THE MEDIEVAL TEAGHER^ 

The Younger Pliny tells ns that only an ar- 
tist may criticise the works of art, but all man- 
kind may pass judgment on the lives of men 
who are friends of humanity. Such lives, how- 
ever short, never melt into the general void, but 
shed forever a sweet aroma within the circle of 
their rememberers. And when such lives are 
prolonged beyond the patriarchal limit they 
serve as beacon lights, as finger posts, to all who 
must travel the same pathway in the future. 

As I listened to the eloquent gentlemen who 
have preceded me, and noted the gains which 
the cause of popular education has made within 
the present century, my mind, somehow, re- 
verted to a not dissimilar situation in the remote 
past, to the very dawn of our modern civiliza- 
tion. Then, as at the opening of this century, a 
world lay before the restorers of civilization; 

1 Discourse delivered at Hartford, Conn., January 25, 1897, 
on the occasion of the celebration of the eighty-sixth anniversary 
of the birth of Dr. Henry Barnard, one of the founders of the 
common school system of the United States. 

230 



THE MEBIMVAL TEACHER. 231 

then a mass of civil and religious ruin was 
added to the obstacles of nature ; then the usual 
difficulties of State building were increased by 
the immensity of the debris and the utter raw- 
ness of the material for the foundation work. 
The pioneers of education in the United States 
found at hand Christian character, doctrines, dis- 
cipline of life, knowledge of good and evil, vir- 
tue and vice, an educated sense of justice and a 
respect of law, ancient and familiar models to 
imitate, and unity of race and language. But 
the pioneers of education in Europe found none 
of these — they were as men who go out upon a 
dark and pathless sea without chart or compass 
or light. 

Then, again, it struck me that if ever the law 
of continuity be true of institutions in particu- 
lar, it is especially so in the history of educa- 
tion, so that whatever institution has been 
enabled to reach the present, and to flourish 
with promise of future growth, must have its 
roots in its own remote past, and must keep in 
touch with the long-tried laws of its life-history, 
if it would hope for permanent efficacy. The 
present is ever the child of the past, in human 
institutions as in human conduct. It may not 
therefore be amiss to go back a few moments to 



232 THE MEDIEVAL TEACHEE, 

the days when those European ancestors from 
whom we are all descended were laying the 
beams of State and Church, when they were 
emerging from their swamps and their marches, 
to take up the municipal life of the Roman provin- 
cials, and to transform the essential paganism of 
the Roman State into a system of politico-social 
life imbued with the pure and vital spirit of 
Christianity. Perhaps, too, in celebrating the 
history of a century of education it is not out of 
place that a Catholic priest should say some- 
thing of the incomparable educational merits of 
that institution which has seen the rise and fall 
of so many systems of education, and which 
alone on earth to-day can bear trustworthy per- 
sonal witness to the history of human hopes and 
ideals for nigh two thousand years. 

The Christian teacher of the Middle Ages! 
It is Boethius and Cassiodorus in Italy, men 
who collect with reverence the elements of 
classic science and the principles of human wis- 
dom, to hand them down to a time of wider 
peace and more varied opportunities — Roman 
men of the best classic type, from that Italy 
in which the lamp of scholarship never went 
utterly out, and in which the system of schools 
was never quite suspended. It is Isidore of 



THE MEDIEVAL TEACHER. 233 

Seville in Spain, the great Bede and Alcuin in 
England, Colchu and Dicnil in Ireland. Their 
knowledge was what we now call encyclopaedic, 
and such, too, was their method. They affected 
the manual and the cultivation of the memory, 
— but we must remember that they were deal- 
ing with races young in culture, physically vig- 
orous, and strongly attracted to a manifold 
external activity ; also that they lived in an 
iron age of change and war, and that no mean 
of political stabiHty had yet been reached 
around them. 

So they opened their little schools, sometimes 
in the palace of king or count, of tener in the 
cathedral-close or the cloister of the abbey. 
Municipal life and civil architecture were yet in 
embryo — peace, and books, and rewards, and a 
logical career were as yet furnished by the 
Church alone. Often, too, they were clerics, 
and they taught on feasts and holydays a divine 
learning, the complement and sanction of their 
rudiments of human science. On such occasions 
they had for scholars the rude lords of the soil 
and the slow tillers thereof, coarse men-at-arms, 
who were charmed with the teacher's high views 
of history and human society, his varied 
learning and his skill in speech. 



234 THE MEDIEVAL TEACHER, 

Such a teacher knew Latin well, and some- 
times Greek. He was skilled in the church- 
song. And so he trained the little choristers 
and the youthful clerics in the history and litera- 
ture of the world's mightiest State, and he fitted 
them to hold the highest offices in the powerful 
ecclesiastical society that enclosed and protected 
on all sides the growing body of mediaeval States. 
His students were legion, for progress and cul- 
ture were then synonymous with the churches 
and monasteries that were springing up in every 
Christian State of Europe. He taught arithmetic 
and geometry, which latter included the elements 
of mechanics and architecture, sculpture, and 
painting. Astronomy, too, was to be had in his 
school, and all such mathematical knowledge 
as was needed for ecclesiastical purposes. The 
study of grammar meant a liberal education in 
the classic texts used, for by grammar was meant 
an all-sided interpretation of them. With it 
went the study of music, no small element in 
the gradual softening of domestic manners, and 
the development of mediaeval art. Dialectic, 
or the art of correct thought, and rhetoric, or 
that of ornate and persuasive speech for the 
public good, were favorite studies — indeed, all 
these branches made up the seven liberal arts, 



THE MEDIEVAL TEACHEB. 235 

or the perfect cycle of education as the Middle 
Ages understood it, and loved to symbolize it 
in its miniatured manuscripts, on the sculptured 
portals of its cathedrals, or the carved bases of 
its pulpits. 

The inseparable text-book of the mediaeval 
teacher was Yergil, and his majestic Latin the 
highest scientific ideal. Yet by the devotion to 
Vergil he prepared the ground for the blossoming 
• of the vernacular tongues, whose first great mas- 
ters had learned from the Latin classics the 
adorable art of correct and pleasing speech. 
What a distance between the jabbering bar- 
barians whom St. Gall met at Constanz and the 
author of the "Nibelungen Lied" or the "Chan- 
son de Roland" ! In the five or six centuries of 
classic formation that intervenes, somebody has 
taught these men the highest architectonic of 
literature. It was the mediaeval teacher with 
his Vergil and his Bible, his childlike faith and 
his true artistic sense. If we could doubt it, the 
witness of Dante would be there to convince us, 
for to that crowning glory of mediaeval teaching 
Vergil is ever the " Maestro e Duca," the " dolce 
pedagogo " from whom he has taken 

" lo bello stile che m'ha f atto onore." 

Civil society was also the debtor of such a 



236 TBE MEDIEVAL TEACHER. 

teacher. It was he who preserved the text and 
the intelligence of the Civil Law of Eome, as 
confirmed in the Code of Justinian, and he 
helped to amalgamate with it the rude customs 
and precedents of the wandering tribes that had 
squatted on the imperial soil. He taught the 
fingers of Frank and Gothic soldiers how to 
form letters, and he taught their children how 
to draw up the necessary formulas for the con- 
duct of pubHc and private interests — charters, 
laws, wills, contracts, privileges, and the like. 

Nor was he ashamed to handle the imple- 
ments of the fine arts, like a St. Eloi and a 
Bernward of Hildesheim, and to fashion count- 
less objects that translated into material form 
the ideal beauty which haunts forever, though 
forever unattained, the heart of man. Even the 
domestic arts — agriculture, fishery, road and 
canal making, irrigation — all the humble arts 
that bring men closer together, and develop the 
social instinct, and enable men to dominate the 
pitiless grinding forces of nature, were taught 
the people by these men, as endless references 
in the mediaeval annals show, from the Orkneys 
to the Black Sea. 

It is the glory of the Old Church that these 
teachers were her priests and her monks, and 



TBE MEDIMVAL TEACHEB. 237 

that in every land she cherished them by her 
councils and by her endowments. If she had 
nothing else to be proud of, that would be much 
indeed. It was said of Melanchthon, and before 
him of good old Jacob Wimpheling, that he was 
" Prseceptor Germanise." It might be said with 
greater truth and wider application that the Old 
Church was " Prseceptor totius Occidentis/' the 
universal teacher of Europe from the Vistula to 
the Scheld, from Otranto to Drontheim. 

One might imagine that in those troublous 
times such men would be pardoned had they 
paid little attention to the philosophy of educa- 
tion, to methodology, and to general pedagogics. 
But the truth is far otherwise. We have in 
every century a number of pedagogical treatises 
of a general or specific character^ on schools and 
teachings in general, on the formation of the 
nobles or the ecclesiastics, all of which breathe the 
most sincere devotion to the teacher's vocation. 
Alcuin, Hrabanus Maurus, Sedulius of Liege, are 
but a few of these writers, and in the thirteenth 
century there is an entire galaxy of writers on 
pedagogics, whose treatises are far from despic- 
able and are indeed worthy of veneration when 
we recall the extent of their actual influence. 
On the eve of the Reformation appear the ad- 



238 THE MEDIJSVAL TEACHEB. 

mirable treatises of Silvio Antoniano and Jo- 
hannes Dominici, two cardinals, of Maphseus 
Vegius, -^neas Sylvius (Pius II.), Erasmus, and 
Vives, while the teaching and the system of the 
Brothers of the Common Schools in the Nether- 
lands and along the Rhine are the admiration of 
aU the historians of that time. At the same 
time the secondary education throughout North- 
ern Europe, notably in England and Scotland, 
had reached a high degree of development quite 
independent of the movement of the Renais- 
sance. But here we are at the end of the Mid- 
dle Ages; the vocation of its teachers, though 
not gone, has changed; the whole theory of 
education is about to pass over into other hands, 
and to be informed by a new spirit, born of the 
circumstances and needs that followed the great 
religious upheaval and the shattering of the 
Catholic unity. 

Still for a thousand years the mediaBval 
teachers had worked at the formation of the 
men and women of Europe. And if, in any art, 
one may turn with pride to the masterpieces as 
proofs of the skill and the training of the artist, 
we may do so in a special manner in the art 
which Gregory the Great called the art of arts 
— the government of souls. Great ecclesiastics 



TBE MEBIMVAL TEACREB, 239 

and prudent statesmen, saints and bishops and 
popes, princes and kings of high repute, came 
out of their schools, as well as a brave and 
patient people, artistically endowed, lovers of 
poetry and art and all the higher graces of the 
mind, dowered with strong faith, and accus- 
tomed to bear the crowding ills of this life by 
the contemplation of a better one. Names rush 
to one's lips, but I forbear to recite them — > I 
will only say that we cannot afford to forget or 
neglect any system of study by which the world 
was enriched with such philosophers and theolo- 
gians as St. Thomas and Duns Scotus, such his- 
torians as Otto of Freising and Froissart, such 
poets as Dante and Chaucer, such architects as 
Arnulf of Cambrai and Brunelleschi, such states- 
men as Suger and St. Louis. It is on such names, 
no less than on the fabric of Church and State 
strengthened and developed by them, that the 
imperishable reputation of the Mediaeval Teach- 
ers may be allowed to rest. 



THE BOOK OF A MEDIEVAL MOTHER. 

li^ face of the incredible output of modern 
pedagogical literature, few reflect that the Mid- 
dle Ages had a respectable series of books on the 
education of children. From the works of good 
old Cassiodorus and Ennodius of Pavia in the 
sixth century down to the days of St. Thomas 
of Aquino and St. Bonaventure, there is quite a 
library of " Instructions," " Discourses/' " Moni- 
tions/' and the like ; sometimes addressed to the 
public in general, sometimes drawn up for the 
formation of royal youth. The Middle Ages 
heard less talk about methods of education ; 
were less accessible to the thousand whims and 
vagaries that get themselves accepted by igno- 
rant or careless municipalities, only to rouse in 
the end a sense of disgust and shame. They 
laid, and rightly, more stress on the ethical 
views of life — duty, calling, responsibility, right 
and wrong; and were unable to conceive any 
education that was not framed on the basic 
principles of immortality, revelation, and final 

240 



THE BOOK OF A MEDIEVAL MOTHER. 241 

judgment. This world was God's footstool, and 
the generations of mankind were His beloved 
children journeying ever to a condition of end- 
less joy, of perfect and enduring love. 

So the Middle Ages educated first the heart of 
man. For this they had many pedagogical in- 
struments — the moulding power of personality 
and example instead of a feeble bureaucratic 
imperialism of text-books and manuals, the 
chastening action of great penances and of sub- 
lime renouncements. They had, too, the assidu- 
ous reading of the Scriptures, at least in the 
venerable and familiar Latin of the Vulgate. 
They had the "Lives of the Saints" — a celes- 
tial pedagogy for every class and calling. They 
had the rules of monastic orders and brother- 
hoods, the monuments that an all-transforming 
faith incessantly uplifted in every Christian land 
— churches, cathedrals, monasteries, with all the 
lovely handicraft that educated eye and hand, 
heart and brain. They had the educating con- 
troversies of the empire and the priesthood, with 
their extensive literature ; they had the wars of 
the Crusades with their expansive influences; 
the luxurious wild growth of the vernacular 
tongues ; the powerful compressive action of the 
Latin tongue beneficial to thought and expres- 



242 THE BOOK OF A MEDIEVAL MOTHER. 

sion. Heresy, Islam, the missions, kept open 
and active the minds of the men of the West. 

We must not imagine that thinkers like 
Albertus Magnus, Eoger Bacon, and Raymund 
Lullus were so very rare merely because their 
names or their lucubrations have not reached us. 
"All literature," says Goethe, "is only a frag- 
ment of fragments." We know now that the 
Roman schools of Northern Italy and Southern 
France never quite interrupted their traditions 
of teaching, either in curriculum or method; 
that the Irish teachers of the eighth and ninth 
centuries were the saving bridge of several 
secular sciences; that the monasteries sheltered 
scholars, sciences, books — above all the spirit 
and passion of learning, the holy root from 
which knowledge springs eternal. Who created 
that positively new thing in education — the 
University — but the priests, students, abbots, 
and bishops of the twelfth and thirteenth cen- 
turies, quite in keeping with the Zeitgeist? 

One of the most curious pedagogical monu- 
ments of the Middle Ages is the " Liber Manua- 
lis," the work of a woman — Dodana, Duchess 
of Septimania (Southern France), in the ninth 
century. Not that the women of that century 
were unable to read and write — ^at least a 



THE BOOK OF A MEDIJEVAL MOTHER. 243 

number of the more distinguislied in society, 
and all those who lived in the numerous monas- 
teries or were sent there for a better training. 
Whoever has read ^^Ekkehard," the beautiful 
historical romance of Scheffel, knows the wide 
field of woman's activity at this time. The 
genial and contemporary chronicler, Einhard, 
has left us a pen-picture of the education of the 
daughters of Charlemagne, that must have been 
true of many other women, noble and plebeian. 

It was long thought that Dodana was a 
daughter of Charlemagne ; but recent researches 
of Leopold Delisle, the eminent mediaevahst, 
leave little doubt of the falsity of this opinion. 
In any case, she was a lady of high birth ; for 
in 824 she was married, in the imperial palace 
at Aix-la-Chapelle, to Bernard, the young Duke 
of Aquitania and Septimania and Count of 
Barcelona, son of William of Gellone, one of 
the great warriors of Charlemagne — another 
Charles the Hammer, who cleared the Riviera of 
Arabs, fixed his standard in their city of Barce- 
lona, and died a Benedictine and a saint. He 
enjoys the additional later glory of a vast epic 
" Chanson de Geste," written in honor of •" Guil- 
laume au court nez." 

From the union of his son Bernard and the 



244 TBE BOOK OF A MEDIEVAL MOTHEB. 

Lady Dodana was born another William, whom 
the fates of war and diplomacy kept a hostage 
at the court of Charles the Bald after the bloody 
battle of Fontanet (841), as a gage of the fidelity 
of his great Southern vassal. In the same year 
another son was born to Dodana, whom the 
father bore away to Barcelona, leaving the 
mother in charge of his city of Uzes. He had 
never treated her as a Christian husband; the 
charms of the beautiful and ambitious violinist 
Judith, second wife of Louis the Pious, had long 
drawn him to her side, until the oppressions and 
scandals of their government grew intolerable, 
and Bernard was compelled to fly to his Proven- 
cal strongholds, there to wait the outcome of the 
fratricidal struggle of the children of Louis, 
which opens and conditions the mediaeval life of 
France and Germany. 

It is to her eldest son, William, that Dodana 
writes, or rather dictates, by the hand of her 
scribe Yislabert, the little book just mentioned. 
Its composition occupied her for more than a 
year. It is exactly dated — a rare thing for 
mediaeval books; she began it on the Feast of 
St. Andrew, November 30, in 841, and ended it 
on the Feast of the Purification, February 2, in 
843. We hear, therefore, in her pages the voice 



THE BOOK OF A MEDIEVAL MOTHER. 245 

of a Carlovingian mother across one thousand 
years of history. The manuscript was known 
to Baluze, Pierre de Marca, D'Achery^ and Mabil- 
lon, but has been fully published only in our 
own day.^ 

The young hostage at Aix-la-Chapelle had left 
a great void in the mother-heart of Dodana. 
With unusual courage she will ease the aching by 
writing a book to her dear son. And the writ- 
ing becomes a sweet daily task, a kind of journal 
intime, that acts as a strong searchlight over the 
manners and consciences of ninth-century Chris- 
tians of the class and type of Dodana. She 
writes : — 

" Men know many things that are foreign to me, and to other 
■women like me — but to me more than the others. Still, He 
is always present to me who can open the mouth of the dumb 
and make eloquent the tongue of childhood. . . . Therefore my 
son, I send you this discourse, or manual {_sermo manualis], that 
it may be like one of those splendid chess-boards that recreate 
young men ; or like one of those muTors in which women love 
to gaze that they may compose their features and be pleasing 
to their husbands. Thus, my son, you shall use this book. It 
is a mirror in which you may see the image of your soul, not to 
please the world, but to please Him who created you out of noth- 
ing. Indeed, I am deeply concerned for you, O my son Will- 
iam! My soul is forever consumed with the desire of your 
salvation. In that hope I write you these pages." 

1 "L'Education Carlovingienne, le Manuel de Duodha," edit^ 
par E. Bondurand (Paris, Picard, 1887, 8vo, pp. 271). The name 
is variously spelled : Duodha, Dhuodana, Duodana, Dodana. 



246 THE BOOK OF A MEDIEVAL MOTHER. 

She might well be anxious ; for though saints 
like Arnulf of Metz and Wandrille of Fontanelle 
came out of the court, its atmosphere was cor- 
rupting. The battle-horse and gleaming sword, 
the rank of count and fair lands to govern, were 
the great prizes of service with the Karlings as 
elsewhere; but the earlier pages of Gregory of 
Tours and the annals of the time show that the 
passions of men were little, if any, di:fferent from 
those of earlier and later days. A pretty acros- 
tic that forms her own name opens the book into 
which she has breathed all her noble heart — 
it is an invocation to God that He may protect 
her son William, for whom her heart is torn with 
anguish. Then come seventy-three chapters, 
curiously short and long, like the broken cries of 
sorrow and the tender gossip of love — the out- 
pourings of the illimitable sea of a mother's 
affection. She converses with him on the love 
of God, the greatness of God, all the attributes 
of the Divinity; on the Trinity — a touch of 
those transitional ages in which there echoed 
yet some sounds of the great christological 
struggles. She recalls to him the virtues of 
faith, hope, and charity; the duty and manner 
of prayer; his obligations to his superiors, 
his neighbors, the priests and the teachers who 



THE BOOK OF A MEDIEVAL MOTHER, 247 

have charge of him. Had Ruskin known this 
little manual, he would surely have quoted 
from it in his "Pleasures of (Mediaeval) Eng- 
land." 

Conduct is based on faith ; hence the rest of 
the work is taken up with the moral duties of 
the young man: the trials of life and how to 
surmount them. Sorrow, persecution, disap- 
pointment, sickness, will come, and who will 
shelter his bruised and torn heart? He must 
become a perfect man ; he must preserve himself 
spotless. Already the Christian ideas which 
gave rise to the character of the chevalier and 
the gentleman crop out even in the intimate 
communings of a saintly mother. The little 
book is full of unctuous prayers and ejaculations 
that she would have him utter often for his 
prince, the Church, his father, for the dead, for 
" the very good and the not very good " ; among 
other things, j9ro versis et litteris compositis tuis 
— " for your verses and literary compositions." 
Perhaps the young William already handled the 
lance and the ^^framea," or short sword of the 
Franks, with more skill than the " calamus " of 
the monk. 

From this noble mother the young page of 
kingly race, destined to inherit those corners of 



248 THE BOOK OF A MEDIEVAL MOTHEB. 

France and Spain that have never long coalesced 
since their first disruption from the empire by 
the Visigoths, learned that there is a higher 
authority than man ; that riches and power are 
nothing in His eyes ; and that the saints of the 
family are the ones to imitate, not the turbulent 
warriors, — his grandfather the venerable Will- 
iarn, rather than his father the worldly Bernard. 
Withal, she repeats often the lesson of love, re- 
spect, and loyalty to his father, who is always 
her good lord and spouse. " In all things obey 
him ; be the prop of his old age, if so be that he 
reach old age. Cause him no sorrow while he 
lives ; despise him not when you, too, become a 
great and powerful man." This " work of her 
weakness " — 023usculmn jparvitatis mem — is all 
one cry of tender affection ; willingly does Do- 
dana efface herself, and liken herself to the 
Ijumble woman of Chanaan, seeking only the 
crumbs that fall from the table of wisdom, and 
seeking them for her beloved son. 

Charles the Bald was no great or amiable 
character. Yet Dodana would have her William 
be mindful of his own nobility — his magna 
utrinque nobilitds — and be no lip-server, but a 
man of heart, the king's stainless liegeman, in- 
capable of the intrigues that disgraced the family 



THE BOOK OF A MEDIEVAL MOTHER. 249 

of the Karlings since the death of the great 
emperor. 

The pages devoted to the Church and the 
priests are worthy of the faith of Dodana : — 

" The priests are the successors of the apostles, with power to 
loose and to bind. Their task i& to ravish its prey from the 
unclean spirit, and to restore it purified to its heavenly destiny. 
They care and provide for the altar that stands hard by their 
dwelling. They are the guardians of the sacred vessels of God 
which we call souls. The lips of the priest are the repository 
of knowledge ; we seek the law from him, for he is the angel of 
the Lord. Like watchful doves, the priests dkect their flight 
to the windows of heaven, and thus deserve the name of friends 
of God. Honor, therefore, all good priests ; listen to them ; and 
when you meet them kneel not alone before them, but before 
the angels who precede them. Receive often at your table the 
priests of God, together with 'the pilgrims and the poor. Let 
them be your advisers, the ministers of your bounty, which will 
be one day multiplied to you. . . . Confess often to them in se- 
cret, with sighs and tears ; for, as the doctors teach us, true 
confessionfreeth the soul from death. . . . Beseech them to pray 
for you, and to intercede with God who hath made them the 
intercessors of His people." 

More than once Dodana borrows from natural 
history comparisons that are apt and moving, 
even if the facts be as far-fetched as they are 
betimes in the pages of St. Francis of Sales or 
Rodriguez. The duty of mutual help Dodana 
deduces from the example of the deer that lean 
on one another, turn and turn about, when cross- 
ing broad and dangerous rivers. She would 
have William read often the choicest books of 



250 THE BOOK OF A MEDIEVAL MOTHEB, 

the Fathers; he will then be like those doves 
who have drunk from crystal waters, and thereby 
acquired a sharpened vision against the hawk 
and the vulture. 

Cruel domestic experience and the mother- 
instinct tell her that the life of courts and pal- 
aces is a perpetual snare for youthful virtue. 
She knows only one remedy — prayer — the 
remedy of Christ and the saints. So the pages 
of her little book are made sweet with many 
unctuous prayers, most frequently taken from 
the public prayer of the Church, the canonical 
hours. Thus, unconsciously, she reveals to us a 
side of Catholic life that Dom Gu^r anger has so 
often admirably illustrated in his "Liturgical 
Year " - — the powerful influence that the daily 
official services of Catholicism exercised on the 
whole society of the Middle Ages, creating vo- 
cabularies, literatures, poetry, arts, music; in- 
terpenetrating and spiritualizing the whole 
mediaeval man. 

This admirable "Handbook" of a mother 
ends, like a last will and testament, in tears 
and benedictions, with recommendations of her 
many dear departed — a whole necrology such 
as is often met with in the contemporary 
"confraternities of prayers." In her blessings 



THE BOOK OF A MEDIEVAL MOTHER. 251 

it has been well said ^ that she is like an ancient 
priestess performing with all solemnity the 
ritual of her domestic hearth — , 

" My son, God give thee the dew of heaven and the fat of the 
earth. Amen. 

" May He vouchsafe thee abundance of oil, wine, and wheat. 
Amen. 

" May He be thy buckler against all enemies. Amen. 

" Be thou blessed in the town, in the country, at the court ; 
blessed with thy father, blessed with thy brother ; blessed with 
the great, blessed with the little ; blessed with the chaste, blessed 
with the sober ; blessed be thy old age, blessed be thy youth, 
even to that day when, hero of many combats, thou shalt set 
foot in the kingdom of the soul. Amen." 

In a closing effusion she recommends her son, 
now sixteen years of age, to master this wise 
advice, and to break it betimes, like food, to her 
other dear son, whose name she does not know ; 
for the father had taken him away hastily before 
baptism. She feels that her days are drawing 
to an end. Lonely chatelaine on the terraces of 
Uzes ! She has much to do to cope with the 
creditors of her husband, among whom are some 
Jews. Grief and pain have reduced her bodily 
strength. She will not see the flourishing of 
youth in her second boy. In an acrostic that 
spells the name of her beloved William she 
reminds him that this journal — for such it is — 

1 Mgr. Baunard, "Reliques d'Histoire" (Paris, 1899), p. 61. 



252 THE BOOK OF A MEDIEVAL MOTHEB. 

was finished on his sixteenth birthday (Novem- 
ber 30, 842), the Feast of St. Andrew, '' near the 
time of the coming of the Word." 

In a codicil she comes back upon the " sweet- 
ness of her too great love, and the sorrow she has 
at not being able to gaze upon his beauty." She 
begs him to have pity upon her soul, and urges 
upon him, in terms of exquisite pathos and ten- 
derness, the duty of praying for her eternal weal. 
Finally, she beseeches him to put down her 
name on the family necrology, among the Guil- 
hems, the Cunegondas, the Withbergas, the 
Gaucelins, the Heriberts, the Eodlindas, the Ger- 
bergas — noble dames and lords of her great 
family. For her tomb she dictates the epitaph 
to her scribe Yislabert — "that all who visit 
it may pray for the humble Dodana, whose body 
made of earth has returned to the same." 

Artless, broken in style, overlapping, without 
literary order or ornament, the Book of Dodana, 
nevertheless, appeals to every heart, especially 
to that multitude of men and women of a later 
day to whom the habit of introspection has 
become a second nature. This is the journal of 
a soul — but not of a soul that has cast its 
moorings, like Amiel, and gotten out on the 
turbulent sea of doubt, amid incessant storm 



THE BOOK OF A MEDIEVAL MOTHER. 253 

and lightning, relieved only by depressing calms 
and mists. It is the join-nal of a saintly soul, the 
colloquy of a Christian mother with her son; of a 
woman fit to be the ancestress of the Blanches 
and the Elizabeths of another century; close 
spiritual kin to women like Madam Craven and 
Eugenie de Guerin. She knows the Scriptures 
and cites them with ease ; some smattering of 
erudition graces her paragraphs ; her Latin, per- 
haps corrected by the scribe, is rude indeed, but 
terse, clear, and direct, with flashes of brilliancy. 
The sorrows of her race did not cease with 
her death. Bernard, her wayward husband and 
son of the saintly Guilhem, was beheaded for re- 
bellion in the year 844. We do not know that she 
survived him. Her beloved William, for whom 
alone this mediaeval Monica walked our valley of 
tears, was captured at the siege of Barcelona in 
850 and put to death. The second son, baptized 
Bernard, lived only to take vengeance on Charles 
the Bald ; after fruitless attempts, he perished in 
a skirmish in 872. The strong lives of both are 
now forgotten, save by the toilsome chronicler of 
dates and names. But the pages of their moth- 
er's "Handbook," wet with her tears and aro- 
matic with her virtues, have drifted down from 
age to age, and are likely to edify in the centu- 



254 THE BOOK OF A MEDIEVAL MOTHEB. 

ries to come many a similar heart, whether it 
beats upon a throne or beneath the roof of some 
humble cottage. Love is strong, and death is 
strong ; but a mother's love, like Rizpah, defies 
time and the elements, being a godlike thing. 



GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTUEY. 

The latter half of the fifteenth century was in 
many respects the acme of the intellectual life 
of Germany. The native or acquired tenden- 
cies that had long found a manifold expression 
in architecture and the fine arts^ in song and 
music and the drama^ in the refinement of man- 
ners, seemed at this moment to flower into a 
newer and a higher life. The invention of 
printing, the discovery of the New World, the 
liberalizing influences of the Italian Renaissance, 
the fall of Constantinople, the creation of new 
universities, the rivalry of the new States now 
rising from the hopeless wreck of the mediaeval 
imperial idea, the ecclesiastical unity won back 
after long decades of disruption, incessant 
travel, the growth of the commercial spirit and 
system, contributed, each in its own measure, to 
that wondrous development of German culture, 
wealth, and enterprise which so excited the 
admiration of iEneas Sylvius,^ and worthily 
crowned the first thousand years of German 

1 De situ, moribas et conditione Germanise, Basilese, 1551. 
255 



256 GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTUBY, 

Christianity. The spirit which cast out from 
Spain the Arab and the Jew, which worked 
the unification of all French interests in the 
hands of an absolute king, and opened up for 
Italy her first clear vista upon the long-gone, 
glorious days of universal empire, brought about 
in Germany a development of popular education 
such as had yet been witnessed in no European 
State. The flourishing condition of the univer- 
sities of Germany, notably of Cologne, Heidel- 
berg, Freiburg, Basel, Tubingen, Ingolstadt, 
and Vienna — the highest outgrowth of this 
movement — is a proof of its intensity and uni- 
versality. Nor was the thirst for learning con- 
fined to any particular class. The village schools 
were numerous and well-frequented ; the teachers 
were well paid, contented, and highly esteemed ; 
the disciphne of youth was strict but loving; 
the homiletic teaching of the clergy attracted 
great numbers ; and the new-found art of print- 
ing spread abroad on all sides the elements of 
religious instruction — pictorial catechisms, hymn- 
books, manuals of confession and a holy death, 
expositions of the commandments, and brief com- 
mentaries on Holy Writ. But it was especially 
in secondary instruction that the best results of 
th.e older and healthier, more Christian, human- 



GEBMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTUBT, 257 

ism had been obtained. Throughout Germany, 
especially in Westphalia and the Rhenish lands, 
public secondary schools abounded. The city 
fathers multiplied them; beneficent citizens es- 
tablished new ones by will or aided by legacies 
those already in existence; dwelling houses 
under the care of devoted and experienced men 
were opened for the students; libraries were 
built and increased — in a word, the unity of 
the ideals and interests of the Fatherland 
seemed to find nowhere a better background 
for its illustration than the cause of education. 
The Brothers of the Common Life at Deventer, 
ZwoUe, Louvain, Liege, and other places, showed 
the world for the first time a corporation of 
great scholars devoted solely to the holy art of 
teaching. Nor could any country boast of bet- 
ter specimens of the erudite and gentlemanly 
tutor or master than Alexander Hegius, John 
Cochlaeus, Murmellius, and Jacob Wimpheling, 
the "Educator of Germany." Such men were 
the trainers of those who conducted the numer- 
ous monastic, capitular, municipal, and private 
schools, and from them went out a generation 
of refined and skilful teachers, who made the 
schools of Germany famous throughout all 
Europe. Women like Charitas and Clara Pirk- 



258 GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTURY, 

heimer illustrated by their pedagogical skill such 
centres of general culture as Niirnberg, and 
honored their sex and country by the practice 
of every virtue, while by the example of the 
most cultured and self-sacrificing womanhood 
they brought up the daughters of Germany in 
the admiration of whatever was pure, noble, 
and elevating.^ 

The Reformation fell like a thunderbolt upon 
this scholastic development. It shook to its 



1 Cf . Janssen, ' ' Geschictite des Deutschen Volkes beim Ausgang 
des Mittelalters" (Freiburg, 1887, 13tb ed.), Vol. I., pp. 1-138. Sel- 
dom, if ever, have the details of an intellectual movement or condition 
been collected with greater pains or set forth with more art than 
here. The following pages summarize the treatment of the intel- 
lectual condition of Germany as given by Janssen and his literary 
heir and successor, Pastor, in the seventh volume of the same work 
(Herder, Freiburg, 1893) , for the century intervening between the 
Reformation and the Thirty Years' War (1517-1618). It ought to 
be unnecessary to remind our readers of the method of Janssen. 
The numerous details for this particular study have been collected 
by him and by his successor, Pastor, from the public documents of 
Catholics and Protestants ; from the histories of education, univer- 
sities, colleges, and schools ; from the correspondence of teachers 
and the scholastic legislation ; from contemporary polemics and 
brochures ; from reports bf nuncios and relations of ambassadors ; 
from the histories of cities and monasteries, orders, bishoprics, lit- 
eratures, and the arts ; from histories of heresies and morals — in 
a word, from almost countless public and private, edited and un- 
edited, sources. The domestic history of Germany, especially those 
pages written in the local historical reviews, annals, collections, 
studies, etc. , have furnished some rare materials, which have often 
been first made widely known through their incorporation into the 
structure of Janssen's " History of the German People." 



GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTURY. 259 

ancient foundments the principle of authority in 
Church, State, and society, and it was no wonder 
that the schools soon felt the reaction. Who- 
ever has watched the decay of university life in 
New Italy will have some faint idea of the dis- 
asters that overtook the German schools in the 
sixteenth century, and made their condition as 
pitiable as it had once been admirable and envi- 
able. Unprofitable and noisy polemics, religious 
bickerings, personal hates and persecutions, end- 
less territorial revolutions and rectifications of 
frontiers, the establishment of a governmental 
control, minutely absolute, in place of the an- 
cient self-regulation and constitutional indepen- 
dence — all these causes cooperated to interrupt 
the current of educational progress that had set 
in during the fifteenth century with the rise of 
a German-Christian humanism. None of them, 
however, exercised so baneful an influence on 
the schools as the new doctrine of justification 
by faith alone and the consequent depreciation 
of good works as beneficial for salvation. Self- 
ish avarice and love of luxury began to dispute 
for the control of that wealth which the wiser 
and more human-rational ancient faith had 
taught men to employ for the common good. 
New foundations ceased to be made, and the old 



260 GEBMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTURY. 

ones were confiscated or wretchedly adminis- 
tered. The large and kindly love of Catholic 
Germans for the unborn generations, the gen- 
erous preparations for their physical and intel- 
lectual welfare, decreased with the spread of a 
narrower, harder belief; and the contempt for 
the past increasing with the ignorance of its 
titles and its relations to the present, a great 
portion of the German people lost that noble 
trait of public generosity which is everywhere 
an outcome of intense Catholic belief. It shut 
itself up within the little circle of its own imme- 
diate personal interests, leaving to the State or 
to chance the care of those general wants for 
which individuals at one time provided so largely 
from wealth superfluous or no longer needful. 

Already, in 1524, Luther complained in a 
letter to the municipal authorities that with the 
old priesthood the ancient fame of the German 
schools was disappearing. "Under the popes," 
he says, "not a child could escape the devil's 
broad nets, barring a rare wonder, so many mon- 
asteries and schools were there, but now that 
the priests are gone good studies are packed off 
with them. . . . When I was a child there was 
a proverb that it was no less an evil to neglect 
a student than to mislead a virgin. . . . This 



GEBMAJSr SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTUBY. 261 

was said to frighten the' teachers." He reminds 
his readers that he has freed them from masses 
and indulgences, vigils and feasts and fasts, men- 
dicant monks, confraternities, etc., but in return 
the common man will do nothing for schools, 
and the princes are sunk in gluttony and de- 
bauchery.^ A year later he wrote to the Elector 
that there was now neither fear of God nor 
Christian discipline since the pope's power was 
broken. "The devil," said he, in a sermon of 
1530, "has misled the people into the belief 
that schooling is useless since the exit of the 
monks, nuns, and priests. ... As long as 
the people were caught in the abominations of 
the papacy, every purse was open for churches 
and schools, and the doors of these latter were 
widespread for the free reception of children who 
could almost be forced to receive the expensive 
training given within their walls." The local 
histories and city chronicles of the time show 
the popular feeling that with the ancient Cath- 
olic clergy went one of their chief works and 
occupations, the teaching and control of the 



1 For these and all following details, see in general, " Geschiclite 
des Deutschen Volkes seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters," von 
Johannes Janssen, erganzt und herausgegeben von Ludwig Pastor 
(Herder, Freiburg, 1893), Vol. VII., pp. 1-211. 



262 GEBMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTURY, 

children. Henceforth reading and writing in 
German, with some knowledge of figures, were 
to take the place of the classics, and technical 
training to supplant the liberal mental discipline 
of philosophy, history, and the natural sciences. 
Even in Catholic Germany the contempt of 
studies spread, and King Ferdinand felt forced 
to admit, in his reformation proposals to 
the Council of Trent, that in all the German 
universities there were not in 1562 as many 
students as in the good old times frequented a 
single one. The official reports of the govern- 
ment Visitatoren^ specimens of school and church 
legislation, and the correspondence of the super- 
intendents show that the number of the common 
schools decreased steadily during the sixteenth 
century in the Electorate of Saxony, in Branden- 
burg, Weimar, Pomerania, Brunswick, Hesse, 
and other Lutheran lands; that the instruction 
of females was greatly neglected, and the form- 
ation in the use of the native tongue insufficient 
and inferior in quality ; that the buildings were 
often unsuitable for school purposes ; that the 
nobles neglected their duties as patrons and 
supporters of the schools within their districts; 
that the teachers were frequently common work- 
men, tailors, dyers, shoemakers ; that the church 



GEBMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTUBT, 263 

sextons, who were in many cases the village 
teachers, gave great scandal by their unedifying 
lives, their magical and superstitious practices, 
treasure-hunting, etc. 

On the other hand, it is evident from other 
sources that the German village-teacher of the 
sixteenth century had long ceased to be the 
happy and prosperous pedagogue of the latter 
half of the fifteenth. His dwelling was usually 
poor, old, and neglected; his pay small, and 
given frequently in kind, uncertain, and grudg- 
ingly accorded. We can, therefore, scarcely won- 
der that he was harsh and cruel in his treatment 
of the unfortunates committed to his care, and 
that corporal punishment was often carried so 
far as to permanently maim or lame the subject 
of it, while it was no uncommon thing to beat 
children heavily about the head, to scourge them 
until the blood ran freely, and generally to mal^ 
treat them, especially if they were poor, or un- 
fortunate orphans, or otherwise abandoned or 
unprotected. The results of the absence of a 
healthful religious home formation naturally 
manifested themselves in the conduct of the 
youth, a never-failing source of coni plaint on 
the part of the teachers of the last fifty years 
of the sixteenth century. "In this latter poi- 



264 GEBMAN SCHOOLS IN XVL CENTUBY, 

sonous and pestilential time/' wrote, in 1568, 
Johann Busleb, a teacher at Eglen, in the terri- 
tory of Magdeburg, ^^ every one complains of the 
coarse, sensual, godless, shameless, old-Adamic 
life of youth, and that the complaints are just, 
may be known from any of those who treat 
daily with the young." 

In spite of all this, the sixteenth century was 
witness to the superhuman efforts made on the 
one hand by the leaders of the various Protestant 
confessions, and on the other by the Catholic 
Church, to elevate the standard of studies, to 
fire the youth of Germany with noble ideals, to 
stimulate in them habits of industry and a 
healthy spirit of rivalry. Among the Re- 
formers, Melanchthon led the way. His text- 
books of Greek and Latin, his commentaries 
and translations, his academic discourses and 
extensive correspondence, above all, his personal 
influence over a multitude of disciples, won for 
him the title of " Preceptor of Germany," once 
worn with pride by Wimpheling. If the views 
of Melanchthon had prevailed, Greek and Hebrew, 
history and mathematics, would have had a fair 
share in the scholastic curriculum ; more homely 
notions obtained, and Latin became the chief 
subject of study. German was carefully ex- 



GBBMAl^ SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTURY. 265 

eluded from the better schools as offensive to 
the literary taste, and a formal system of es- 
pionage established for the pm-pose of surpris- 
ing the scholars who forgot themselves so far 
as to speak their mother-tongue. At Ganders- 
heim, in 1571, three slips of this kind were set 
down as equal in heinousness to one blasphemy. 
In 1524, Luther wrote with much scorn concern- 
ing the schools in which he and his fellow- 
reformers had been brought up, but in 1582, 
Michael Toxites, professor at Tiibingen, and 
psedagogarch of the duchy of Wurtemburg, 
pronounced in sad and bitter words an equally 
hard sentence on the Latin instruction as given 
since the days of Melanchthon. The cause of 
morality was not helped by the use of the 
"Colloquia" of Erasmus, a model, indeed, of 
exquisite Latin, but otherwise an irreverent, 
cynical, and immoral book, utterly unfitted for 
the formation of good habits, and which was 
equally condemned by Luther and St. Igna- 
tius. Ovid's " Art of Love/' and the unexpur- 
gated works of Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, 
and other dissolute writers of antiquity were in 
common use in the schools. There is surely 
little reason for wondering that the morality 
of .the scholars was very low, and that the hearts 



266 GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTUBT. 

of their teachers, when not themselves affected 
by the laxity of the times, sank within them at 
the sight of the dissipation and evil courses of 
their young charges. The schools of Pforta, 
Meissen, and Grimma in the Saxon Electorate, 
opened like most of the Protestant schools in 
former convents, and supported by Catholic 
funds, were much admired among the Evan- 
gelicals, and drew many students from the Re- 
formed lands. Nevertheless, the reports of the 
visitors and the school-ordinances show that the 
internal discipline was wretched. They contain 
complaints of the immodest, unseemly clothing 
of the scholars, of their richly embroidered wide 
mantles, with puffed sleeves, etc., so that they 
look " mehr reuberisch dann schtilerisch." Blas- 
phemy, thieving, gambling, unchaste conduct, 
drunkenness, and similar vices are set down to 
their account. They are forbidden to break in 
the wine-cellars of the neighborhood ; to break 
up the tables, chairs, and other furniture of the 
school ; to escape secretly by night from its pre- 
cincts ; to keep immoral books and pictures ; to 
visit dances and drinking bouts. Nor were such 
rules useless, or in terrorem, for similar complaints 
come from distinguished teachers like Michael 
Neander at Ilfeld, Basilius Faber at Nordhausen 



GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTUBY. 267 

and elsewhere, Camerarius and Eobanus Hessus 
at Niirnberg, Hieronymus Wolf at Augsburg, 
Johann Sturm at Strasburg, and others. " Would 
that I might talk with you about these things," 
wrote Camerarius in 1536 to Luther, " they are 
by no means vain, unfounded complaints." In 
a letter to George Fabricius, Kector of Meissen, 
written in 1550, he says that the downfall of 
Germany is near, since religion, science, disci- 
pline and honorableness of life are perishing. 
"Education and life are far other to-day," wrote 
he in 1555, " than in my youth (circa 1500), when 
the hearts of the students were filled with zeal, 
studies flourished, and a joyous rivalry reigned 
in the pursuit of learning." 

Polemical enmities between the teachers and 
the preachers in the matters of Justification and 
Communion did much to increase the general 
disorder in the schools. Scarcely a prominent 
school of Protestant Germany was free from 
this evil. Even the minor Latin schools became 
the scenes of theological discussion in which, by 
question and answer, the students were made 
familiar with the theology of their teacher, and 
taught to anathematize his opponent, until such 
time as the religion was changed in the district, • 
and a new set of doctrines introduced. The 



268 GEBMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTUBT. 

salaries of the teachers were very low^ because 
the old pious foundations had been squandered 
or were badly managed. Their dwelHngs were, 
in many cities, unsuitable, and their condition 
generally an unhappy one. They seldom stayed 
long in one place, which added greatly to the 
disorganization of the schools. Finally, the 
stream of pious generosity to which most of 
the German schools owed their existence had 
long since dried up, and little means were forth- 
coming to provide new or sustain the old. " Our 
beloved ancestors," exclaimed the superintendent, 
Christoph Fischer, of Smalkelden, in 1580, 
" provided for the schools by their last wills and 
by foundations. But now we see daily how the 
love of the poor and of needy students is grown 
cold, and the money spent on churches and 
schools is considered a waste." "In the dark- 
ness of the papacy," wrote Conrad Porta, of 
Eisleben, toward the end of the sixteenth 
century, " every one, from the highest to the 
lowest, even servants and day-laborers, contrib- 
uted to churches and schools, but now, in the 
clear light of the gospel, even the rich grow 
impatient if ever so little be asked, even for the 
repairing and maintenance of those on hand." 
Though contemporary and domestic evidences 



GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTURY, 269 

show how unsatisfactory was the entire school 
system of Protestant Germany dm-ing the 
sixteenth century^ there can be no doubt that 
for a portion of that time the schools of the 
Catholics suffered greatly from the consequences 
of the new religious revolutions. In 1541, 
Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz confessed to 
Cardinal Contarini the superiority of the Protes- 
tant schools, and in 1550, the noble Bishop of 
Wiirzburg, Julius Pflug, wrote to Paul III., that 
while the Protestant schools were flourishing, the 
Catholic schools were in a condition of decay. 
Not the least merit of the Society of Jesus in 
Germany is its restoration during the latter half 
of the sixteenth century of the ancient fame of 
schools and academies which had reached the 
lowest step of degradation. In 1556, one of 
the city gymnasia of Cologne was confided to 
them, and in a brief space of time they had 
establishments in Munich (1559), Mainz (1561), 
Trier (1561), Heiligenstadt (1575), Coblenz 
(1582), Paderborn (1587), Miinster (1588), and 
in other large towns and cities like Ingolstadt, 
Dillingen, and Wiirzburg. T'heir enemies did 
not fail to recognize the skill and devotion of 
the new teachers. The superintendent, George 
Nigrinus, complained in 1582 that Protestant 



270 GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVL CENTUBT. 

parents of the upper and middle classes were 
wont to send their children to the Jesuits, and 
to praise their industry and their labors. There 
was a great personal charm in these men, often 
of high birth, trained from youth to self-denial 
and self-control, filled with the enthusiasm of 
Crusaders bent on recovering lost spiritual terri- 
tory, well-bred, and refined by travel and the 
cosmopolitan company of the novitiates and 
colleges. The example of their lives, divided 
between prayer and study, won the hearts of the 
youth intrusted to them, and filled the order it- 
self with the choicest vocations. Their programme 
of studies aimed chiefly at the training of men 
destined to live in the world ; hence the classic 
languages and profane science absorbed most of 
their attention. Nevertheless, the religious for- 
mation of the youth was carefully attended to. 
The daily mass, the frequent confessions and 
communions, the exercises of the special sodali- 
ties, the personal guidance of the tutors and 
instructors, the regularity of the daily life of 
the college, acted powerfully upon the mind and 
heart and imagination, especially in the earliest 
days of the movement, when the fine enthusiasm 
of struggle was at its white heat, and one could 
almost see the fulness of victory in the rapidity 



GEBMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. GENTUBT, 271 

with which the tide of revolution was being 
rolled back. In these houses of study there was 
a thorough unity of spirit and authority. While 
the rector of each was absolute master of the 
internal and external life of the college^ he was 
also responsible for each student, both for his 
bodily and mental development. The original 
programme of studies prescribed constant, but 
not overwhelming, work, provided for moderate 
recreation, forbade the acceptance of gifts or 
presents from the students, and commanded the 
reception of children of every class. 

The teachers were instructed to plant securely 
the seeds of Catholic faith in the hearts of their 
scholars, and to remember that they were not mere 
grammarians or rhetoricians. The hope of dis- 
tinction and the fear of disgrace were proposed 
as powerful and natural motives of labor, and 
corporal punishment was to be rarely administered 
and then by a special official. Between these 
schools there existed close mutual relations, and 
the teachers and text-books of France or Italy 
often found their way to Germany, and vice 
versa. The teaching was in great measure 
gratuitous. The prestige of the order's religious 
and political successes was another element of 
strength, and the polished manners, the courtesy 



272 GEBMAN SCHOOLS IJST XVI. CENTUBY, 

and urbanity of its disciples a proof that it had 
found new sources of influence over the youth of 
Germany, and knew how to draw upon them for 
the perfection of youthful character. They 
withstood the heresies that were being quietly 
instilled in certain schools, like the ancient and 
renowned one of Dtisseldorf, where the catechism 
of John Monheim was overturning the founda- 
tions of the Catholic faith. The Jesuit schools 
of Miinster and Paderborn became in time 
famous nurseries of Westphalian Catholicism, 
and the memories of their period of renown still 
cling about these picturesque old towns like a 
dim but lovely halo. 

Munich, however, seems to have been the 
scene of the highest academical and social activ- 
ity of the Jesuit teachers of the sixteenth 
century. The rapid spread of the order, the 
numerous demands made upon its chiefs for the 
most varied services, religious and political, 
made it hard to keep up always with the needs 
of the age. As early as 1565 the superiors of 
the province of Higher Germany admitted that 
their professors wei'e either men broken by long 
labors or young, unskilled novices. The memoir 
of Jacob Pontanus (1582) and the JEpistola de 
scholasticorum nostrorum moribus of the general 



GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENIJBY. 273 

Aquaviva (1611) show that no one was more 
conscious than themselves of the weaknesses 
that were growing within the order, and which 
it needed the general " Ratio Studiorum " of 1599 
to correct or expel. Withal, their main object 
in this first century of their scholastic activity 
in Germany was an eloqiiens et sapiens pietas, 
the production of pious and devoted Catholics, 
skilled in all the social arts, filled with the prac- 
tical wisdom of life, and bent on preserving or 
restoring the broken unity of the great Christian 
body. 

With the Renaissance there entered into the 
lives of Teutonic and Romance nations many 
elements and motives of the old classic peoples, 
for which they were prepared, indeed, but which 
contrasted, nevertheless, greatly with their own 
mediaeval philosophy. Very significant in this 
regard is the interest taken in the classic drama- 
tists. Already in the latter half of the fifteenth 
century, Terence and Plautus were put upon the 
stage. It was not without protest at the begin- 
ning, for if Erasmus encouraged the practice, 
Jacob Wimpheling was opposed to it. Melanch- 
thon and Luther, and the Reformers generally, 
favored it greatly, and in all their schools the 
plays of the dramatic philosophers of Roman 



274 GEBMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTUBT. 

antiquity were frequently rehearsed. At Stras- 
burg all the comedies of Plautus and Terence 
were, for a time, reproduced in the course of 
every six months, not excepting the most objec- 
tionable plays. The progress of the students, 
the delight of the parents, and the still vivid 
attachment to the mystery plays, were the im- 
mediate motives assignable for the time and 
care given to the classic plays. Though the 
shrewd and practical life-wisdom of the ancient 
comedians delighted the burghers at Christmas 
and Easter, and though the students, in their 
frequent preparation, penetrated profoundly into 
the nature and structure of the Latin tongue, 
more than one teacher of youth deprecated the 
evils of the promiscuous reading and representa- 
tion of plays whose authors were pagan to the core 
and placed upon the public scene situations that 
were shocking to the Christian view of life, and 
principles that offended the basic laws of Chris- 
tian morality. Thus there arose a Christianized 
Terence, a Neo-Latin school-drama, whose sub- 
jects were often taken from the Bible, and 
treated in the most Terentian or Plautian style. 
Both Protestants and Catholics took a part in 
this work. Reuchlin, Schonseus, Gnaphaeus, 
and Macropedius were its foremost champions. 



GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTUBT. 21 Et 

The "Asotns/' " Josephus/' and "Hecastus/' of 
the latter found a lasting popular welcome, as 
did the less praiseworthy works of Nicodemns 
Frischlin — his "Eebecca," "Susanna/' and 
'^ Julius Kedivivus." In time even the Neo- 
Latin school-drama degenerated, and pieces like 
the " Studentes/' the " Amantes Amentes/' and 
the "Cornelius Relegatus" drew more spec- 
tators than the biblical drama. The latter was 
very often treated in a manner offensive to 
Catholics, and no small share of the popular 
hate and ignorance must have come from this 
nominally religious theatre, in which the pope, 
the monks, and the " idolaters " played so large 
and so ridiculous a r61e. 

The peculiarities of the principles and meth- 
ods of the early Jesuits as teachers showed them- 
selves nowhere more strikingly than in their 
treatment of the school-drama. From the be- 
ginning their "Ratio Studiorum" made little or no 
place for Terence and Plautus, and when, later 
on, the latter obtained a hearing, great care was 
exercised to put upon the stage only such plays 
as did not offend the dictates of Christian moral- 
ity. -If the Jesuits made way at all for the 
comedy, it was originally from pedagogical 
motives, the desire to train their students in the 



276 GERMAN SCB00L8 IN XVL CENTUBY. 

arts of oratory and extempore speaking, and to 
develop in them a certain natural ease and 
graceful self-possession which the mimic experi- 
ences of the stage go far to produce. The 
charms of virtue and the hateful ness of sin were 
the lines on which they built up their own thea- 
tre, and when, in the middle of the seventeenth 
century, the Dutch poet, Joost van den Vondel, 
defended the stage against the attacks of Calvin- 
ist writers, he could appeal to the public exam- 
ple of the Jesuits, whose edifying school-dramas 
did so much to confirm their scholars in the 
principles of morality. The subjects were gen- 
erally chosen from the Scriptures or the lives of 
the Saints, and often treated with great literary 
skill. Twice a year was the ordinary rule for 
their presentation, but what was lost in fre- 
quency was made up in magnificence. This 
splendid sumptuous character the Jesuit dramas 
took over from the great mystery-plays of the 
preceding century. Indeed, in every sense the 
school-drama of the Jesuits seems to be the heir 
and successor of these gorgeous " mysteries " of 
an earlier day. Multitudes came from afar to 
the new plays, and the largest halls were un- 
equal to their accommodation. Sometimes they 
took several days in their execution,, and they 



GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTURY. 277 

were often repeated by popular insistence. Who- 
ever has seen the "Passion Play " at Ober-Am- 
mergau, and recalls the emotions it awakens^ will 
have some faint notion of what a magnificent 
school-drama given by the German Jesuits, let 
us say of Munich^ would be like. For it was at 
Munich that the Jesuit drama reached its acme. 
The princely, art-loving Wittelsbacher, always 
half Italian by their position and their ideals, 
were the patrons of the new school, and spared 
nothing to insure the noblest framing of its pro- 
ductions. In 1574 the tragedy of "Constan- 
tine," by the Pater Georg Agricola, was given 
during two days. The whole city was turned 
into a stage, over one thousand actors were in- 
troduced, and an enormous multitude streamed 
in from every side to behold, on one day, the 
gorgeous pomp of the triumphal procession of 
Constantine after the defeat of Maxentius, and, 
on the other, the solemn triumph of the Holy 
Cross, on which the sign of our salvation was 
borne aloft through the city, amid the jubilant 
acclamations of many thousand spectators. In 
Jacob Bidemann the Jesuits of the first quarter 
of the seventeenth century reached the acme of 
their dramatic reputation. His " Joannes Caly- 
bita," "The Egyptian Joseph," " Belisarius," 



278 GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTUBT, 

and " Cenodoxus, the Doctor of Paris/' are said 
to be not unworthy of Calderon. " In general/' 
says von Reinhardstottner, " the Jesuits did 
much great and durable work in the first century 
of their dramatic labors. While they infused 
poetry and art into the dry framework of the 
humanistic drama, they also awakened and pre- 
served throughout Bavaria, and especially in 
Munich, both taste and intelligence for the thea- 
tre and its useful services." 

The wars of religion and the weakening of 
the imperial and papal authority brought about 
a sad condition for the Catholic universities of 
Germany during the sixteenth century. They 
lost more and more their ancient character of 
great independent corporations, representative 
of the highest interests of the Church, elevated 
above party strife and private opinion, animated 
by a love of knowledge and existing only for its 
diffusion. Freiburg in Breisgau, once flourishing, 
degenerated almost totally. Ingolstadt, Cologne, 
and Erfurt were in the same category. The 
University of Vienna, which had risen so rapidly 
under the first Maximilian, sank steadily from 
the outbreak of the Reformation. Its numbers 
decreased, its revenues were ill-managed, its pro* 
f essors were obliged to combine other, occupations 



GEEMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTURY. 2T9 

with their teaching office, and its chairs were 
made centres for the dissemination of heresy. 
Endless proposals of reform were made, but not 
executed. The students were poor and wretched, 
often obliged to beg their bread, because the old 
" Bursen " colleges or dormitories were closed or 
in decay. In fact, it was the loss of these dwell- 
ing houses for the students, erected by the 
Catholic generosity of a preceding age and once 
carefully governed, that brought about the 
downfall of many universities. The private life 
of the academical youth was thenceforth utterly 
without control ; and immorality, idleness, duel- 
ling, and contentiousness gained daily the upper 
hand. The success of the Jesuits in secondary 
instruction suggested them, in this extraordinary 
situation, for the universities, and in the latter 
half of the sixteenth century the theological, 
philological, and philosophical teaching in Cath- 
olic lands of German tongue passed in great 
measure under their control, as at Ingolstadt,. 
Dillingen, Wiirzburg, Cologne, and Trier. Their 
chairs attracted a multitude of students, while 
those of the university professors were often 
utterly neglected. Bitter recriminations arose 
on the part of the latter, especially at Tngolstadt, 
which were paralleled in other university towns, 



280 GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVL CENTURY. 

like Freiburg, Wiirzburg, and Vienna. In, the 
latter place the awarding of university honors 
by the Jesuits was long a source of painful dis- 
putes, the university demanding that all the 
scholars and studies of the Jesuits should be 
under the general supervision of the rector of 
the university, and King Ferdinand replying 
that he would do nothing against the interests 
of the order. During this period the civil and 
ecclesiastical powers looked upon the Jesuits as 
the most reliable and experienced teachers of 
youth, and least likely to mislead or be mis- 
led in the rapid and profound changes that were 
going on in the society of that day. The dis- 
cipline of Jesuit houses was excellent, while the 
once admirable administration of the "Bursen" 
was everywhere disrupted, chiefly because of 
the malversation of the funds, but not unfre- 
quently because, in the confusion of religious 
revolution, the devotion to youth and the pro- 
found pedagogical philosophy of the fifteenth 
century had become cold or forgotten. The 
university professors were wretchedly paid, their 
position that of State servants, their orthodoxy 
suspected, and their authority over the stu- 
dents small. No class of men lost more by the 
Reformation than they, for whereas before it 



GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTUM Y. 281 

they were esteemed members of a self-governing 
body, with ancient traditions and strong social 
authority, they were now little better than day- 
laborerS; without prestige or power beyond their 
personal action, and obliged to assist at the 
transfer to youthful rivals of functions to which 
in the ordinary course of events they would have 
been the natural heirs. 

Of the Protestant universities, some, like 
Tubingen and Leipsic, had been violently re- 
formed; others were new creations, like Mar- 
burg, Konigsberg, Jena, and Helmstadt. In all 
of them the local civil authority reigned supreme, 
and the many changes from Lutheran to Cal- 
vinist dynasty, and vice versa, made the posi- 
tions of the professors uncertain and kept up 
a constant change. The needs of the petty 
German dynasts of the sixteenth century were 
many and great for wars and court, travel, bri- 
bery, and dissipation. The ancient funds of their 
universities were tempting, and their avarice was 
often the cause of the diminution or total disap- 
pearance of the scholastic wealth collected before 
the Eeformation. The power of the emperor 
was now a bit of archaism, and that of the little 
duke or princelet was supreme. All hung upon 
his humor or temperament. Universities like 



282 GEBMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTURY, 

Eostock and Greifswald were made mendicant 
during the whole century. In all of them the 
salaries of the professors were meagre and often 
withheld. The court-fool and the fencing-master 
of the sovereign were far better off, and so low 
did they sink at times that the professors looked 
on it as a valuable privilege to possess the right 
of sale of wine and beer to their students. They 
added other occu.pations to piece out a sufficient 
revenue. They were frequently absent on their 
own business, and a supervision had often to be 
established over their lessons or their daily ap- 
pearance. As there was little dignity in their 
treatment from above, so in turn there was often 
small edification in the example of their lives. 
The public records are full of reproaches and 
specific accusations against the teachers. The 
same records abound in denunciations of the 
students for vanity in dress, neglect of study, 
violent uproarious conduct at night in the public 
streets, maltreatment of the townspeople, " the 
worship of Bacchus and Venus," and general "Cy- 
clopean savagery." In 1537 Melanchthon com- 
plained of the absence of discipline at Wittenberg, 
and of the untamable self-will of the students. 
In 1565 it was not better. Two years previous 
the sons of the Duke of Pomerania left the town 



GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTURY. 283 

because of the dissolute habits of the students. 
They had lodgings in the old Augustinian mon- 
astery, become the property of Luther, and 
where his son Martin kept a tavern. But they 
could not stay; for above them were seven rooms 
full of Frenchmen and Poles, Suabians and Fran- 
conians, whose disorderly life, day and night, 
caused them great inconvenience. Tubingen is 
described by contemporaries as the scene of the 
wildest dissipation. In 1577 the subsherifE of the 
town declared that no citizen dared longer to act 
as constable, and that the place was worse than 
Sodom and Gomorrha. The students resisted 
all attempts at punishment, and every night was 
made hideous with the shouts of revellers, cries 
of angry disputants, breaking of doors and win- 
dows, and an occasional murder of a watchman 
or a fellow-student. In general, academical 
discipline seems to have been to a great extent 
ruined, and the saying ran : — 

" Wer von Tubingen kommt ohne Weib, 
Von Jena mit gesundem Leib, 
Von Helmsfadt obne Wunden, 
Von Jena ohne Schrunden. 
Von Marburg ungef alien, 
Hat nicht studirt auf alien." 

Unhappiest of all men was the new student, 
who had to go through a time of fagging. He 



284 GERMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTURY, 

was called " Beanus " (bec-jaune) or " Fox/' and 
defined as a " wild animal whose horns had to 
be cut off to make him fit to assist at the public 
lectures of the university." Innocent enough 
in its early pre-Reformation stages, this practice 
became a very cruel and inhuman ceremony in 
the sixteenth century, accompanied with heavy 
fines and whole nights of drunkenness. The new 
student had no longer the " Bursen " to go to for 
shelter, and was usually handed over for guid- 
ance to some older student from his own neigh- 
borhood. He became at once the " famulus " or 
slave of this " Herr " or " Patron," waited on 
him day and night, suffered from his fits of 
anger, gave him his money and his best clothing 
— in a word, was his chattel, until such time as 
his own turn came and he ceased to be a " Pen- 
naler" or weak-feathered thing, and became a 
" Schorist" or Shearer of those under him. Wolf- 
gang Heider, professor at Jena in 1667, has left 
us a pen-portrait of " a genuine Shearer," which 
is absolutely untranslatable, and must therefore 
be read in the original. Perhaps no better index 
could be given of the moral tone of many of these 
universities than is found in the " Song of the 
Drinker's Club " of Jena, a much-beloved " Lied " 
of the early part of the seventeenth century : — 



GEBMAN SCHOOLS IN XVI. CENTVBT, 285 

"Lasst uns schlemmen und demmen bis morgeni 
Lasset uns frohlich sein ohne Sorgen ! 
Wer uns nicht bargen will, komme morgen ! 
Wir haben nur kleine Zeit hier auf Erden, 
Drum muss sie uns kurz und lieb doch werden. 
Wer einmal stirbt, der liegt und bleibt liegen, 
Aus ist es mit Leben und mit Vergniigen. 
Wir haben noch von Keinem vernommen : 
Er sei von der Holle zuriick gekommen, 
Und habe verkiindet wie dort es stiinde. 
Gute Gesellschaft treiben ist ja nicht Siinde, 
Sauf also dich voU und lege dich nieder ! 
Steh auf und sauf und besaufe dich wieder." 



BATHS AND BATHING IN THE MIDDLE 
AGES. 

One of the most stupid calumnies on the 
manners of the Catholic Middle Ages is that 
bathing was forbidden, that it was seldom prac- 
tised, and the like. The authority of Michelet 
contributed greatly to confirm this untruthful 
statement, and within a few years Eenan has 
repeated it in the last volume of his " Origins of 
Christianity." Under the aegis of these impartial 
patriarchs it may be expected to flourish in spite 
of all solid reasons to the contrary. Would that 
we had many such precious volumes as the 
" Historical Blunders " of Father Bridgett, which 
treats with precision and finality a number of 
similar errors. 

The primitive Christians frequented the public 
baths, as may be easily deduced from the well- 
known anecdote of St. John and Cerinthus, 
which St. Irenseus has handed down to us. 
Clement of Alexandria enumerates the reasons 
for which a Christian man or woman may visit 
the baths, and that chapter of the " Psedagogus " 



BATHS AND BATHING IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 287 

might be read yet with profit, so moderate and 
sensible is it. Tertullian, though inchned to 
diminish the frequency of bathing, is convinced 
of its necessity, and tells us in his '^ Apology " 
why and when he ' bathed. St. Augustine re- 
lates in his "Confessions" that among other 
means of allaying his sorrow at his mother's 
death, he was moved to go and bathe, since the 
Greek name of the bath signified its power to 
banish sorrow from the heart. 

The " Apostolic Constitutions," an old episco- 
pal manual originally compiled about the begin- 
ning of the third century of our era, look upon 
the use of the bath as quite a matter of course, 
and only provide against certain abuses. The 
ancient Christian cities of Syria were well pro- 
vided with baths, some of which are yet in ex- 
cellent preservation, and there is every reason 
to believe that the larger churches of the 
Orient had baths attached to them for the use 
of the clergy. Such baths existed at Naples in 
the early Christian ages, as one may see by the 
miniatures in the work of Paciaudi on the sacred 
baths of the Christians. Eusebius of Caesarea 
and St. Paulinus of Nola are guarantees that 
they were commonly attached to the greater 
churches in Syria and Italy. No doubt men 



288 BATHS AND BATHING IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 

like St. Cyprian^ St. Epiphanius, and St. Jerome 
were much opposed to the use of the common 
baths by Christians, but their objections were 
well founded. The public baths too often per- 
mitted the promiscuous bathing of both sexes, 
which was shocking to the Christian mind. 
Moreover, they were the resorts of all the 
loungers and gossipy people of the town. For- 
bidden amusements were connected with them, 
lewd women visited them, and these resorts 
encouraged the vice of female drunkenness, es- 
pecially abhorrent to the Graeco-Roman peoples. 
To visit such baths seemed to many against 
the decorum and gravity which should mark 
the professors of Christianity, not to speak of the 
uglier features of these establishments which no 
amount of imperial legislation could keep free 
from disreputable reproaches. Diadochus of 
Photice, a moderate master of the spiritual life, 
who flourished in the fifth century, expressly 
says that bathing is no sin, but that it is a sign 
of a virile soul and an act of temperance if one 
abstain from it. We may understand such 
teaching as applying not to bathing in general, 
but to the use of the luxurious public baths. At 
the same time we find Theodoret, the great 
bishop of Cyrrhus in Syria, providing baths for 



BATHS AND BATHING IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 289 

the people and building aqueducts for their 
maintenance. A century earlier the Council of 
Laodicea, legislating concerning the use of baths, 
merely condemned the promiscuous bathing of 
both sexes. In fact, the necessity of bathing 
was felt by the ancient Christian peoples to be 
almost as great as that of eating and drinking, 
and to go about unbathed, in sackcloth and 
ashes, seemed to them the greatest of penances. 
Even the monks were allowed to bathe, and the 
antiquarian Christianus Lupus tells us that the 
bath was looked on as no less indispensable to 
every ancient monastery than its kitchen. The 
early Fathers, in general, had no objection to 
baths being used for cleanliness or health, and 
Gregory the Great was willing that they should 
be used on Sunday. 

The splendid baths of Rome were gradually 
closed after the middle of the fifth century, not 
through any action on the part of the popes, but 
because the barbarian Huns had cut the aque- 
ducts which fed these magnificent structures. 
The baths of Constantinople remained in use 
through the Middle Ages, and those of Alex- 
andria and Brusa in Bithynia were also well 
known and frequented. 

In the article on baths in the " Encyclopaedia 



290 BATHS AND BATHING IN THE MIDDLE AGES, 

Britannica," Dr. John Macpherson, author of 
" The Baths and Wells of Europe " declares that 
it is doubtful if the practice of bathing was ever 
disused to the extent that is usually represented. 
It is not only doubtful, but certain, that bathing 
was exceedingly common during the Middle Ages, 
as any one can convince himself who cares to 
read, I will not say the original chronicles and 
biographies of the time, but the numerous his- 
tories of the economy, luxury, architecture, and 
popular habits of those days. 

In the Revue du Monde Catholique for March, 
1866, M. Lecoy de la Marche has an interesting 
article, in which he examines the false statement 
of Michelet concerning the supposed ecclesiastical 
prohibition of baths in the Middle Ages. M. de 
la Marche shows the contrary from an extended 
examination of the lives of the saints, the chron- 
icles, the statutes of the caretakers of baths, the 
names of streets and the like. In the Archives 
for the Study of Austrian History for the year 1859 
Zappert has treated at length the question of 
bathing in the Middle Ages and shown the fre- 
quency of the custom. The hot air and vapor 
baths of the Byzantine peoples were adopted by 
the Mohammedans, and later on made known to 
the peoples of Western Europe through the 



BATHS AND BATHING IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 291 

Spanish Arabs and the Crusaders. They were 
in great demand as a cure of leprosy, and com- 
petent authorities state that after the beginning 
of the thirteenth century there were few large 
cities in Europe without them. Their statutes 
are well known to us. The Jews were allowed 
to visit them once a week. Lepers had separate 
baths. Men and women were not allowed to 
frequent the same bath. 

Mediaeval theologians like the authors of the 
" Summa Angelica" and the " Summa Aurea" dis- 
cuss the casuistry of the bath, and thus bear wit- 
ness to its general use. Before the Reformation 
we know from Erasmus that even heated baths 
were common in Belgium, Germany, France, and 
England, where they were called hothouses. It 
would seem that they were commonly adjoined 
to inns, and Montaigne speaks of them as exist- 
ing at Rome in the sixteenth century. 

In the first volume of Janssen's '^ History of the 
German People " there are many details concern- 
ing the popular use of baths in Germany during 
the Middle Ages. Men bathed several times 
each day ; some spent the whole day in or about 
their favorite springs. From the 20th of May 
to the 9th of June, 1511, Lucas Rem bathed one 
hundred and twenty-seven times, as we may see 



292 BATHS AND BATHING IN THE MIDDLE AGES, 

by his diary. It was the custom to eat and 
drink in the bath. While the preachers thun- 
dered in the churches against the gay young 
men who sat in the baths, mocked holy things, 
and talked civil and religious heresies, this 
gilded youth made merry and sang all manner 
of songs and catches. 

" Aussig Wasser, innen Wein 
Lasst uns alle frohlich sein." 

Grave authors of the sixteenth century like 
Gothofredus and Zypseus deplore the nude bath- 
ing of the soldiers in the neighborhood of the 
towns and oppose to it the ancient and more 
modest customs of the primitive Romans. 

Lest it should be thought that this frequency 
of bathing belongs only to the later Middle Ages, 
and is an outcome of the refinement consequent 
upon the Crusades, let us look a little more 
closely into the sentiments of the early Middle 
Ages concerning the bath. The Council of TruUo, 
held at Constantinople toward the end of the 
seventh century, forbids the promiscuous bathing 
of monks or laymen with persons of the other 
sex, which implies the existence and use of 
baths under certain conditions of natural mod- 
esty. The famous Gottschalk, a monk of the 



BATHS AND BATHING IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 293 

ninth century, who suffered many scourgings and 
long imprisonment for his heretical stubbornness, 
was nevertheless allowed to bathe frequently, as 
his opponent, Hincmar of Eheims, testifies in a 
letter to the Archbishop of Sens. St. Gregory 
of Tours in the sixth century speaks of the 
baths attached to the monastery governed by 
St. Radegunda at Poitiers. We have already 
seen that Gregory the Great did not forbid 
Sunday bathing, and we find one of his suc- 
cessors, Nicholas I. (died 867), enunciating his 
views of bathing in the very remarkable and 
valuable document known as the '^ Replies to the 
Bulgarians," where he states that bathing, when 
practised for sanitary purposes, has nothing 
objectionable. 

K Michel et and Renan had paid any attention 
to the venerable " Liber Pontificalis," they would 
never have committed the error in question. 
This ancient book, whose origin is obscure, but 
seems to be somewhere about the beginning of 
the sixth century, contains short lives of the 
popes, with a brief account of some of the 
events of each reign, from St. Peter to the end 
of the ninth century. The criteria for its practical 
use have been admirably set forth by the Abbe 
Duchesne, its learned editor. In this ancient 



294 BATHS AND BATHING IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 

record of the papacy the use of baths at Rome 
is frequently mentioned. Constantine is said to 
have given three large bathing establishments to 
Pope Sylvester. The church of St. Mary 
Major's at Eome had baths attached to it in the 
middle of the fourth century by donation of 
Pope Liberius, and they seem to have been 
remodelled, a century later by Pope Xystus II. 
Pope St. Damasus at the end of the fourth 
century gave baths to the new parish of St. 
Lawrence at Rome, and similar gifts are men- 
tioned as made by Popes Innocent and Hilary in 
the fifth century. Shortly after them Pope 
Symmachus gave baths to the church of St. 
Pancratius and opened new ones behind the 
church of St. Paul. 

We frequently meet these ecclesiastical baths in 
the succeeding centuries. Toward the end of the 
eighth the baths of St. John Lateran and St. 
Peter's become famous in Europe. The popes 
of that time restore the ancient aqueducts to 
feed those baths, build approaches and staircases, 
line the halls with marble, and provide accommo- 
dations for the poor and strangers. Of one, Pope 
Hadrian (died 795), it is said that he built baths 
at St. Peter's, " where our brethren, the poor of 
Christ, are wont to bathe," and his successor, 



BATHS AND BATHING IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 295 

Leo III. (died 816), improved greatly this same 
establishment. 

We may, therefore, conclude with the great 
scholar and canonist, Van Espen, that the cus- 
tom of bathing was never forbidden or discour- 
aged by the Church authorities. The Middle 
Ages were for a long time no better off than 
antiquity in the matter of bathing accommo- 
dations. The river, lake, or pool satisfied peo- 
ple accustomed to live in the open air, and as 
yet not parked off in monstrous cities, where 
the last remnant of individuality is menaced. 
But the Church never curtailed their natural 
freedom. K plebanus or rural parish priest of 
the time of Charlemagne would smile at such 
an ignorant assumption, though he would know 
that some abstained from bathing by a spirit of 
mortification, and that the Church condemned 
certain abominable bathing abuses. If you 
pressed him still further he would point to the 
mineral springs and baths of France and Ger- 
many, which had not to wait until our day to 
be discovered, and refer his interrogator to 
Rome, where the city baths and the church 
baths played so large a share in the daily life 
of the city of the Leos, the Stephens, and the 
Hadrians. Perhaps this good parish priest might 



296 BATES AND BATHING IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 

have heard from wandering Keltic missionaries 
of the famous English establishment of Bath, 
where the old Koman works were yet preserved, 
or even of the famous Holy Well of St. Wini- 
fred, in WaleS; whither, it may be, both insular 
and continental pilgrims were already wont to 
journey for the purpose of bathing in this splen- 
did and beneficent spring. He would point to 
the universal practice of the good King Carl 
and his Franks and to the baths at Aachen, and 
wonder how this traveller froni Altruria had got 
so mixed up in his notions of mediaeval culture 
as to imagine that the contemporaries of Alcuin 
and Einhardt were no better than Digger 
Indians. 



CLERGY AND PEOPLE IN MEDIEVAL 
ENGLAND. 

It is with, great satisfaction that we see ap- 
plied to the English Middle Ages the same an- 
alytico-critical methods that in the hands of a 
Taine have revolutionized the history of the 
French Revolution, in the hands of a Janssen 
that of the German people before and during 
the Reformation, and in those of a Pastor the 
beginnings of modern papal history. Among 
the ablest and most useful chapters of the first 
volume of Janssen is that which deals with 
ecclesiastical teaching and preaching in the 
generation that preceded the appearance of 
Luther. Eusebius-like, the great historian does 
scarcely more than link together the numerous 
contemporary and public evidences of official 
concern for the religious instruction of the 
people. Whoever peruses those pages must 
admit that, whatever else was wrong in Ger- 
many, there was then no dearth of religious 
instruction, either oral or printed. 

297 



298 CLERGY AND PEOPLE 

In his learned and timely book, " The Eve 
of the Reformation" (London, 1900), Dom Gas- 
qnet comes back on the same subject, and de- 
molishes for England the same old calumny — 
viz. that the Catholic clergy were so sunk in 
vice and ignorance at the time of the Reforma- 
tion that the latter epoch may well be called a 
very sunburst of religious knowledge. In his 
"Essays on the Reformation," Dr. Samuel Mait- 
land, himself an Anglican, had already shown 
what lack of veracity, what unprincipled lit- 
erary methods, one might suspect .in all the 
earliest Protestant writers on the English Refor- 
mation, such as Strype, Fox, and Bishop Burnet. 
In a general way, Mr. James Brewer, the schol- 
arly editor of the papers of Henry YIII. and 
historian of his life, concludes as a result of 
documentary labors at first-hand that " the six- 
teenth century was not a mass of moral corrup- 
tion out of which life emerged by some process 
unknown to art or nature; it was not an addled 
egg cradling a living bird ; quite the reverse." 

In Germany, England, and the Northern 
Kingdoms, the Reformation was a work very 
largely of cupidity and avarice ; were it not for 
the fat revenues and the well-tilled lands of 
churches and abbeys, the old religion would not 



IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND. 299 

have seen arrayed against it those kings and. 
'princes who made the fortune of the Luthers 
and the Cranmers. Nowhere, except in the 
Peasants' War — and that was a social rebellion 
— do we see any general voluntary upheaval of 
the people against the venerable figure of Ca- 
tholicism ; brute force, the treachery of its own 
agents, and a torrent of calumny were the chief 
weapons of the first memorable campaign against 
the authority of the Church. It was reserved 
for a later period to justify the vast rebellion by 
pleading, among other attenuating causes, the 
universal neglect of their pastoral duties by the 
Catholic clergy, secular as well as regular, in 
every land of Europe. 

If the accusation were true for England, it 
could only mean a general violation of the Eng- 
lish Church law as established in many synods 
and promulgated in numerous manuals of cleri- 
cal duty. Thus the Synod of Oxford in 1281 
decreed : — 

" We order that every priest having charge of a flock do, four 
times in each year — that is, once each quarter, on one or more 
solemn feast-days — either himself or by some one else, instruct 
the people in the vulgar language, simply and without any 
fantastical admixture of subtle distinctions, in the articles of 
the Creed, the Ten Commandments, the Evangelical Precepts, 
the seven works of mercy, the seven deadly sins with their off- 
shoots, the seven principal virtues, and the seven sacraments." 



300 CLWBGT AND PEOPLE 

This means that the whole cycle of Christian 
doctrine had to be expounded to the people 
every three months ; and, lest the parish priest 
be in doubt as to the character of the instruc- 
tion, the synod insists in considerable detail on 
each of the points mentioned. As late as 1466 
a synod of the province of York reiterates this 
decree and its comment. These regular and 
homely talks were, of course, more efficient than 
formal discourses; though the latter were not 
wanting, as may be seen by the numerous old 
volumes of mediaeval sermons yet preserved. 
Neglect to assist at these instructions was a 
matter of confession for the penitent, as the 
carelessness in delivering them was a reproach 
to the parish priest. "If you are a priest," 
says an old pre-Eeformation manuscript in the 
(Oxford) Harleian Library, " be a true lantern to 
the people both in speaking and in living. . . . 
Read God's law and the expositions of the holy 
doctors, and study and learn and keep it ; and 
when thou knowest it, preach and teach it to 
those that are unlearned." 

So great was the concern for popular religious 
instruction that this duty was placed above that 
of hearing Mass. Richard Whitford, the Monk 
of Sion, writes in his " Work for Householders " 



IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND. 301 

(1530) that ^' if there be a sermon any time of 
day let them be present, all that are not occu- 
pied in needful and lawful business. All other 
occupation laid aside, let them ever keep the 
preachings rather than the Mass, if perchance 
they may not hear both." That most popular 
of the fifteenth-century manuals of religious 
instruction, the "Dives et Pauper," says that 
"by preaching folks are stirred to contrition 
and to forsake sin and the fiend, and to love 
God and goodness. ... By the Mass they are 
not so ; but if they come to Mass in sin they go 
away in sin, and shrews they come and shrews 
they wend away. . . . Both are good, but the 
preaching of God's word ought to be more dis- 
charged and more desired than the hearing of 
Mass." 

Similar advice is found in such- works as 
" The Interpretatyon and Sygnyfycacyon of the 
Masse," by Robert Wyer (1532) ; in " The Myr- 
rour of the Church ; " in Wynkyn de Worde's 
" Exornatorium Curatorum ; " and in the " Eng- 
lish Prymer," printed at Rouen in 1538. 

It has often been said and written, very 
falsely, that the Catholic clergy of the Middle 
Ages fostered ignorance and superstition in 
order that they might make pecuniary gain 



302 CLEBGT AND PEOPLE 

therefrom ; hence, for instance, their encourage- 
ment of the devotion to images, particularly to 
the crucifix. What better refutation could we 
ask than the apposite words of the blessed 
martyr, Sir Thomas More?^ 

" The flock of Christ is not so foolish as those heretics would 
make them to be ; for whereas there is no dog so mad that he 
does not know a real coney from a coney carved and painted, yet 
they would have it supposed that Christian people that have rea- 
son in their heads, and therefore the light of faith in their souls, 
would ,think that the image of Our Lady were Our Lady herself. 
Nay^ they be not so mad, I trust, but that they do reverence to 
the image for the honor of the person whom it represents, as 
every man delights in the image and remembrance of his friend. 
And although every good Christian has a remembrance of Christ's 
Passion in his mind, and conceives by devout meditation a form 
and fashion thereof in his heart, yet there is no man, I ween, so 
good and so learned, nor so well accustomed to meditation, but 
that he finds himself more moved to pity and compassion by be- 
holding the holy crucifix than when he lacks it." 

How maliciously the first Eeformers dealt 
with the common people is strikingly put in a 
discourse of Roger Edgeworth, a preacher of the 
reign of Queen Mary : — 

" Now at the dissolution of the monasteries and friars' houses, 
many images have been carried abroad and given to children to 
play with; and when the children have them in their hands, 
dancing them in their childish manner, the father or mother 
comes and says : ' What, Nase, what have you there ? ' The 
child answers (as she is taught) : ' I have here my idol.' Then 

1 "Salem and Bizance," a dialogue betwixt two Englishmen, 
whereof one was called Salem and the other Bizance. London, 
Berthelet, 1633. 



IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND, 303 

the father laughs and makes a gay game at it. So says the 
mother to another : ' Jagge or Tommy, where did you get that 
pretty idol ? ' — ' John, our parish clerk, gave it to me,' says the 
child ; and for that the clerk must have thanks and shall not lack 
good cheer. But if the folly were only in the insolent youth and 
in the fond, unlearned fathers and mothers, it might soon be 
redressed." 

In the very popular fifteenth-century religious 
manual already referred to, the "Dives et Pau- 
per," the devotion to the crucifix, and especially 
the Adoration of the Cross on Good Friday 
known as the " Creeping to the Cross," is ex- 
plained with admirable correctness and terseness. 
Few modern English books of devotion can 
boast a language so chaste and idiomatic, or so 
much clearness and conciseness of statement, or 
so much unction and pathos. And are not the 
following lines a noble paraphrase of the great 
mediaeval hymn to the dolors of Jesus Christ 
Crucified, notably the "Salve Caput Cruen- 
tatum " ? 

" When thou seest the image of the crucifix think of Him that 
died on the cross for thy sins and thy sake, and thank Him for 
His endless charity that He would suffer so much for thee. See 
in images how His head was crowned with a garland of thorns 
till the blood burst out on every side, to destroy the great sin of 
pride which is most manifested in the heads of men and women. 
Behold and make an end to thy pride. See in the image how 
His arms were spread abroad and drawn up on the tree till the 
veins and sinews cracked ; and how His hands were nailed to the 
cross and streamed with blood, to destroy the sin that Adam and 



304 CLEBGY AND PEOPLE 

Eve did with their hands when they took the apple against God's 
prohibition. Also He suffered to wash away the sin of the wicked 
deeds and the wicked works done by the hands of men and 
women. Behold and make an end of thy wicked works. See how 
His side was. opened and His heart cloven in two by the sharp 
spear ; and how it shed blood and water to show that if He had 
more blood in His body, more He would have given for men's 
love. He shed His blood to ransom our souls and water to wash 
us from our sins." 

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries man- 
uscript manuals of instruction abounded among 
the clergy, as the inventories and wills of the 
period show. Among these were the favorite 
" Pars Oculi Sacerdotis," with its " Dextra " and 
" Sinistra Pars ; " also the " Pupilla Oculi Sacer- 
dotis," of John de Burgo. Similar manuals are 
among the precious incunabula of the English 
press. In his valuable work on^ " The Old English 
Bible" (London, 1898), Dom Grasquet has gone 
over in detail many other evidences of popular 
religious instruction in pre-Reformation Eng- 
land. The written sources of religious edifica- 
tion were accessible not only to the common 
people of England, but also to those of Wales 
and Ireland. 

Vernacular prayer-books continued to be pub- 
lished in Welsh down to the end of Henry's 
reign ; even later, says the Hev. J. Fisher. ^ 

1 "The Private Devotions of the Welsh" (London, 1898). For 
similar literature in Irish, see Douglas Hyde's "Literary History of 



IJV MEDIEVAL ENGLAND. 305 

"It is rather a curious fact/' he adds, "that 
nearly all the Welsh manuals of devotion and 
instruction, of any size, published in the second 
half of the sixteenth and the first half of the 
seventeenth century were the productions of 
Welsh Koman Catholics and published on the 
Continent." 

The researches of Janssen and others have 
clearly shown that originally and for a consider- 
able time ecclesiastics considered the printing- 
press as a most desirable means of religious 
propaganda. Bibles, prayers, sermons, cate- 
chisms ; spiritual exhortations, examinations of 
conscience, reprints of popular hand-books of 
religion, woodcuts of saints, and religious art- 
works, issued in great numbers from the presses 
of Cologne, Paris, Venice, Rome, and other cities. 
Their titles may be seen in the repertories of 
Hain, Copinger, and Panzer. 

What modern journalism does for the artist 
of the twentieth century as bread-giver, that was 
done in the olden times by churchmen, who 
have ever looked on the illuminated page, the 
decorated book, the ecstasied saint, the patient 
martyr, as true "helps" to religion. King 

Ireland" (New York, Scribners, 1899) and the New Ireland Review^ 
passim. 



306 CLERGY AND PEOPLE 

Ethelbert beheld and was touched by the picture 
of Christ that Augustine bore at the head of his 
procession of monks that famous day in Kent. 
And we are told that the rude Bulgarian chiefs 
were first moved by a picture of the Last Judg- 
ment. In the judicious words which follow, 
Dom Grasquet emphasizes for pre-Reformation 
England a similar spiritual preoccupation on the 
part of her clergy and a corresponding earnest- 
ness on the part of the Catholic laity, 

" In taking a general survey of the books issued by the English 
presses upon the introduction of the art of printing, the inquirer 
can hardly fail to be struck with the number of religious or quasi- 
religious works which formed the bulk of the early printed books. 
This fact alone is sufficient evidence that the invention which at 
this period worked a veritable revolution in the intellectual life 
of the world was welcomed by the ecclesiastical authorities as a 
valuable auxiliary in the work of instruction. In England the 
first presses were set up under the patronage of churchmen, and 
a very large proportion of the early books were actually works of 
instruction or volumes furnishing materials to the clergy for the 
familiar and simple discourses which they were accustomed to 
give four times a year to their people. Besides the large number 
of what may be regarded as professional books, chiefly intended 
for use by the ecclesiastical body, such as missals, manuals, bre- 
viaries, and horse, and the primers and other prayer-books used 
by the laity, there was an ample supply of religious literature 
published in the early part of the sixteenth century. 

" In fact, the bulk of the early printed English books were of 
a religious character; and as the publication of such volumes 
was evidently a matter of business on the part of the first English 
printers, it is obvious that this class of literature commanded a 
ready sale, and that the circulation of such books was fostered 
by those in authority at that period. Volumes of sermons, works 



IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND. 307 

of instruction on the Creed and the Commandments, lives of the 
saints and popular expositions of Scripture-history, were not only 
produced, but passed through several editions in a short space of 
time. The evidence, consequently, of the productions of the first 
English printing-presses goes to show not only that religious 
books were in great demand, but also that, so far from discourag- 
ing the use of such works of instruction, the ecclesiastical authori- 
ties actively helped in their diffusion." 

In the Middle Ages the principles, spirit, ideals, 
and aims of the Church had so interpenetrated 
the popular life that only the smallest part of 
her actual teaching was represented by the 
spoken and the written word. All the phenom- 
ena of social life were colored, transfigured, 
by the spirit of religion. The public square — 
no longer forum or agora — was like an enor- 
mous open-air vestibule to the cathedral, parish, 
or abbey church. On it the dramatic "mys- 
teries," processions, " penances," and other popu- 
lar forms of religious life were enacted with 
every recurring festival of high or low degree. 
To a great extent it was the church of the people, 
in which they executed, not without love and 
piety, the offices of their own rude and fantas- 
tic liturgy. Within the churches another free 
and large liturgical worship displayed its charms, 
more orderly and traditional, yet endlessly new 
and universally artistic; natural, too, like the 
flowering of a mountain side in spring. 



308 CLEBGT AND PEOPLE 

The churches themselves were huge folios in 
stone — "the books of the unlearned," easily- 
read by people yet accessible to the old patris- 
tic mysticism that culminated in a St. Bernard, 
yet looking to the desert as a refuge from the 
cosmic sin and shame of life, and whose native 
sense for symbolism was undulled by the scholas- 
tic formalism of a later time. There was every- 
where a picturesque and plastic ^' public prayer " 
understanded of all, whose multitudinous social 
influences Dom Gueranger and his Benedictine 
school have admirably illustrated for the last 
forty years. Painting and sculpture and music 
— all the Muses, in fact — began anew their ca- 
reers in the shadow of such great ministers as 
Strasburg, Freiburg, Rheims, Westminster, and 
Chartres. A hundred minor arts, the "Klein- 
kiinste," acted as ordinary skilled tutors to eye 
and hand and brain, potently and sweetly draw- 
ing forth every latent capacity of race or family 
or surroundings or traditions. Something holy 
and soulful they infused into every product of 
man's handiwork, something highly personal 
and unique, stifling in every raw material the 
coarse and deathly grossness of it, which else 
had led the Middle Ages, as all others, into 
idolatry. Let the Catholic reader, especially, 



IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND. 309 

meditate deeply on what Jolni Ruskin has writ- 
ten concerning the artistic life of mediaeval Flor- 
ence and Venice. 

In these and many other ways the mediaeval 
peoples enjoyed a religious teaching, at once 
living, pleasing, artistic, manifold ; the outcome 
of a deep and universal conviction that this 
world and life, though good, were transitory; 
that man had an immortal soul for which he 
was responsible to a beneficent but just Creator ; 
that society had its end in God, its saviour and 
ensample in Jesus, its nurse and guide in the 
Church. Folly and turbulence and grossness 
and ignorance there were, of course. But those 
peoples were not, like us, incapable of hearing 
or appreciating divine warnings. The passion 
of gigantic wealth was not in them ; they would 
not, if they could, turn the world into one work- 
shop and poison the pure air of heaven with the 
filth and the darkness of the breath of avarice. 
•We may well look back to them as we meditate 
on the probable issue of the principles and forces 
that are idolized to-day — Plutus and Mammon 
and the minor gods that serve them. 

The mediaeval people, though violent and 
narrow, because young, were not draped in a 
stoical self -righteousness nor sunk in a practical 



310 CLERGY AND PEOPLE 

atheism; neither had they our Judaic stiffness 
of neck and hardness of heart. Sandbiles fecit 
nationes — it is possible to heal the fevers of life 
— they thought. But it could be done only by 
a divine Physician, working at the true roots of 
evil and misery — the mind's darkened eye and 
the heart's perverted inclinations. This is why 
they all held so firmly to the heavenly pedagogy 
of tears, contrition, compunction, satisfaction, 
and lifelong sorrow; why they produced those 
good works of art and charity whose splendor 
yet attracts and consoles us. All told, are we 
more moral and holy than the men of the age of 
St. Louis of France and St. Francis of Assisi ? 



THE CATHEDRAL-BUILDERS OF 
MEDIEVAL EUROPE. 

If we observe ourselves and the multitudinous 
life about us, we shall all agree that most of 
what is typical, characteristic of our own gen- 
eration, perishes with us. Man is largely a 
thing of the present. Most of his time is spent 
in fighting off decay and death, that, neverthe- 
less, press on him with the slow and certain 
speed of the Alpine glacier. Of the popular 
daily life of the middle of the last century, only 
reminiscences remain ; and when those are gone 
whose hearts and minds still retain vivid im- 
pressions of the past, the tide of oblivion makes 
swifter haste, and soon obliterates all but the 
most striking landmarks, those great events and 
institutions that are the common property of a 
race or a nation. Even literature, though it is 
usually said to hold the most sacred experiences 
of every people, is only a fragment of fragments, 
retains but a tithe of the passions, the hopes, 
the struggles, the triumphs and glories, that 
made up the sum of life as it was. actually lived 

311 



312 TEE CATHEDEAL-BUILDEBS 

by men and women. As far as the past is con- 
cerned, we walk amid shadows and reflections, 
in an ever deepening twilight. 

This thought is of some importance when we 
look back over the thousand years of the Middle 
Ages for some great convincing illustration of 
the spirit and scope of Catholicism, something 
that shall be as strictly its own work as the 
Homeric chants or the marbles of the Parthenon 
are the work of the Greek soul, the great roads 
of Europe and the Code of Justinian the product 
of the genius of Rome. Catholic Christianity in 
that thousand years of the Middle Ages domi- 
nated fully and freely the life of European man- 
kind. What legacy has it left the human race, 
at once monumental and unique, useful and 
holy, worthy of its own claims, and comparable 
with those remains by which we judge other 
religions that lay, or once did lay, claim to 
universal acceptance ? Say what we will, make 
what appeal we will to the social benefits of a 
religion, its written documents of a literary 
character or value, its political uses, its success- 
ful moulding over of the common heart, its 
answers to the eternal questions of the soul, the 
common conscience, its upbuilding of the spirit- 
ual man, individually and collectively — develop 



OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE. 313 

all these admirable arguments as we will, there 
remains the deep and just query : What monu- 
ments has it left behind ? 

The hand of man is very cunning, and tends 
very naturally to fashion in some public and 
permanent manner the ideals that the brain has 
conceived and the heart cherished. The most 
refined Greek ethnicism had its Acropolis at 
Athens, its Temple of Diana at Ephesus. 
Roman ethnicism had its Temple of Fortune 
at Prseneste, its Coliseum at Rome. Those 
philosophies of life that are as religions to the 
followers of Confucius and Buddha have each 
flowered in a peculiar art that may seem fan- 
tastic to us, but has yet an intimate relationship 
with the doctrines that it glorifies and perpetu- 
ates. General doctrines, that have got them- 
selves lived out, large and constant views of the 
meaning, uses, and end of human life, usually 
blossom out in great monuments, almost as natu- 
rally as the thought of the brain leaps to the 
tongue and clamors for expression. 

It was as a religion that Catholicism domi- 
nated the Middle Ages. The natural monu- 
ments of a religion are its temples. You may 
simplify a religion as you will, curtail its func- 
tions, reduce its influence — but so long as it 



314 THE CATHEBBAL-BUILBEBS 

pretends to bind man with, his Maker, so long 
will it need places of meeting for its people, and 
so long will it set up therein some symbol or 
symbols of its creed. 

The refined paganism of Greece and Rome, 
with which Catholicism came into conflict, had 
such popular centres of worship — the temples 
and shrines of its gods. But paganism had noth- 
ing truly spiritual about it. It was all based 
on fear of its deities, was a religion solely of low 
and coarse propitiation, a mass of deceptive 
practices, a double religion — base superstition 
for the multitude, quasi-agnosticism for the ele- 
vated classes. It had no fixed doctrine to preach. 
It had no central fire of love to which all were 
bidden, no mystic banquet, no divine revelation 
to communicate. Hence, its temples were only 
abodes of the mysterious deity. He alone dwelt 
behind marble walls, within which, as a rule, 
only the priest went and the needed servants. 
Outside, on the temple-square, stood the multi- 
tudes, watching the evisceration of sheep and 
oxen, or the other mummeries of paganism, but 
utterly without any serious share in the act of 
religion that was entirely the affair of the priests 
and the magistrates, a State act. 

With the Christians, from the very beginning, 



OF MEDIEVAL EUBOPE. 315 

it was otherwise. They were one body with 
Jesus Christ, their mystic head. They had been 
all born again in Him, and the true death was 
to lose that new higher life. They were destined 
to union with Him in eternity. They had His 
history in four little books, and the letters of His 
first agents, the apostles. He had fixed a cer- 
tain form for their meetings, that were to be very 
frequent, and at which all who confessed His 
name should assist and partake of a divine ban- 
quet that was none other than His own body 
and blood. 

So the Christians needed a large, free space, 
where all could see one another, where all could 
hear, where access was easy to the eucharistic 
table or altar, around which the ministers of the 
banquet could serve the presiding officer and 
distribute to all the assistants, in an orderly way, 
the celestial food. The God of the Christians 
was no longer far away. He was with them 
day and night. He spoke to them all with 
equal love, and demanded from all an equal 
service. In other words, the doctrine of the 
Blessed Sacrament, of the R^al Presence, de- 
manded at once and created all the essentials 
of a Christian church, such as they are found 
in the catacombs and such as they will exist as 



316 THE CATHEBBAL-BUILBEBS 

long as the religion itself — a table for the sac- 
rifice^ a space for its ministers, an open space 
sufficient for the assistants, light for the per- 
formance of the mysteries in which all were 
sharers and, in a true but mysterious sense, 
actors, light also for the reading of the gospels, 
the Old Testament, the letters from distant 
brethren, the accounts of martyrdom. In time, 
the pagan had to be kept out, the novice ad- 
mitted slowly, the unfaithful excluded and chas- 
tised for a time, the goods, deposits, plate, 
records, of the little communities stored away. 
Thus vestibules, courts, and sacristies were 
added. Thus, too, arose, almost in the Cenacle, 
the first Christian Church, all whose essential 
elements are curiously enough foreshadowed in 
the Apocalypse — indeed, in the holy Temple 
of Jerusalem itself. 

It is a long and charming chapter in the his- 
tory of the fine arts how the typical Catholic 
Church grew up. There was the upper room in 
the residence of the principal Christian of the 
community; perhaps, too, they hired occasion- 
ally a public halL or reading-room. Then came 
the little chamber of some cemetery where an 
illustrious martyr lay. When freedom came, 
there was the little overground chapel, with its 



OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE, 317 

triple apse and its roofless but enclosed court- 
yard, just over the martyr's resting-place ; then 
the vast Roman halls of justice were abandoned 
to them. Sometimes the temples were trans- 
formed for Christian service. Soon they built 
their own — at Rome St. Peter's and St. Paul's, 
the "Great Church" at Carthage, the "New 
Church" at Antioch, at Tyre. Emperors, paid 
for them, and crossed the world to assist at their 
dedication. They were often of the style of the 
Roman courts of justice known as basilicas; 
again they were octagonal or round. Every 
city, every village, had its own. But whatever 
their form or material, they were places of meet- 
ing for a community of men and women, there- 
fore roomy and lightsome. By reason of the 
great central act of the religion, they were 
decently ornamented, provided with an elevated 
altar, beneath which lay the body of some dis- 
tinguished martyr or confessor of Christ, whose 
death was the pledge of final victory over a bad 
and unjust society, a seal of hope, an assurance 
that with faith in Jesus Christ lay the only cer- 
tainty of eternal life. 

The first great Christian churches were owing 
to the constructive skill of Roman architects and 
builders. They embodied the best traditions of 



318 THE CATHEDBAL-BUILBEBS 

imperial architecture, such at least as had sur- 
vived into the fourth century. That they were 
not in absolute decay may be seen from the 
splendid ruins of the Palace of Diocletian at 
Salona. But, given the collapse of Roman 
power, the great building-arts could not long 
survive. Their traditions were easily lost for 
want of exercise. In the Christian Orient per- 
haps they lived on much longer, in Greek Con- 
stantinople, and the remnants of the Roman 
power that Islam did not absorb. But in the 
West a mysterious transformation took place. 
We quit the sixth century holding on to tradi- 
tions of classical forms and workmanship at 
Rome and Ravenna, but we emerge into the 
seventh, in possession no longer of what is 
known as Roman architecture, but of what the 
historians of art are agreed to call Romanesque. 
For five hundred years nearly all the churches 
of Europe are ranged in this category. We 
have no longer in their purity the solemn, long 
nave of the basilica, with its noble monolith 
pillars, tied by correct round arches, on which 
rests the main roof, while the altar is in the 
apse, that is solidly built up and holds on its 
own semicircle of brick its suitable roof. If 
side-naves are needed, they are added from with- 



OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE. 319 

out, with tlieir own columns, low roofs, and en- 
closing walls. In place of such majestic build- 
ings that retained no little of the majesty of 
imperial Rome, and of which a specimen may 
yet be seen at Trier on the Moselle, or even in 
some Roman churches, we get smaller edifices. 
For the great monolith column there are low 
pillars, often made of separate stone drums. 
The arches are lower, more squatty, and depend 
on very thick walls for their support. The open 
upper roof of the old basilica gives way to a few 
narrow windows, mere apertures, but decorated 
with pretty colonnettes. An inside gallery, low 
and narrow, runs around the church just over 
the pillars. A low roof made of wooden beams 
gives an air of dimness and depression to the 
whole edifice. 

Where did the Christian architects of Northern 
Italy, in whose cities it surely arose, get the 
essentials of this style? Did a school of genuine 
Roman architects and builders survive the down- 
fall of their State and culture? Did they live 
on Lake Como, and perpetuate there the skill 
and cunning in building of their Roman ances- 
tors ? Are they the real builders of the first 
Lombard churches, the originators of Roman- 
esque, that afterward was carried by them into 



320 THE GATHEBBAL-BUILDEB8 

France, and Germany, and England, in which 
lands one beauty, one utility after another, was 
added, until such glorious old chiu-ches as Worms, 
Speyer, and others of the Rhineland, were cre- 
ated, until St. Ambrose at Milan, St. Michael's 
at Pavia, and many others, were either rebuilt 
anew or made over after the prevailing style? 
Or is the Romanesque church the result of 
inherited barbarian tastes and traditions strug- 
ghng for expression at the hands of men yet 
raw in the history and forms of architecture? 
Is it the Greek architect of Constantinople, an 
exile, or a left-over from the ruinous exarchate 
at Ravenna, who himself executed, or gave the 
first impulse to those curious buildings in which, 
all over Europe, the traditions of Old Rome are 
seen to underlie a number of new principles and 
suggestions ? Anyhow, Christian architecture 
from Roman .became European by way of the 
Romanesque. Specimens of the latter soon 
arose in every land. The Roman architects 
and builders who followed St. Augustine to 
England, St. Boniface to Germany, built in that 
style. Those who crossed the Alps at the bid- 
ding of Charlemagne, and created the octagonal 
basilica of Aix-la-Chapelle for him, showed that 
they were masters of both Byzantine and Ro- 



OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE, 321 

manesque, for they left after them work of 
both kinds. 

Somehow, even though imperfectly, the build- 
ing-arts were yet tanght in Italy, architectm-e 
was yet understood in the large style of the 
ancients. The great models of antiquity still 
existed — for their final complete destruction 
dates from the late Middle Ages, not from the 
time we are dealing with. There was always 
kept up some interchange of influences between 
Constantinople and the West, at least until the 
Iconoclastic follies and excesses of the eighth 
century arrested the normal development of 
Christian art in its natural home. From the 
city of Eome in the West, and the city of Con- 
stantinople in the East, were kept up a constant 
supply and demand of all that pertained to 
building and the arts that depend on it. 

It is now an exploded fable that there was 
in the year 1000 a.d. a general terror among 
the Christian peoples of Europe at the supposed 
approach of the end of the world. Neverthe- 
less, the two hundred years that followed did 
see a general revival of human interests, ow- 
ing to other reasons. With the civilizing of 
the Northmen, the last stages of the old classi- 
cal world of Greece and Rome disappeared. 



322 THE CATHEDEAL-BUILBEBS 

Latin ceased finally to be a spoken tongue. 
The new vernaculars made out of it began to 
move independently, to affect a higher range 
of activity. With these new instruments of 
thought the life of the peoples of Europe takes 
on a new character. The last border-land of 
the old and the new is reached. Right here 
Catholicism entered more profoundly than ever 
into the lives of these new and ardent peoples. 
Their wills and testaments show it. The popu- 
lation increased rapidly, new churches were built 
in great numbers, and old ones were restored or 
enlarged. Constant demand created a great 
supply of workmen. The intelligence of Italian 
and Greek architects, and the devotion and 
sacrifices of a great multitude of monks, brought 
about improvements in the ordinary Roman- 
esque. Little by little it graduated into the 
incomparable Gothic. The round arch gave 
way to the pointed arch, that could be carried 
much higher, and needed for its support no thick 
and cumbersome walls, only a sufl&cient lateral 
resistance or pressure to prevent it from falling. 
Now the heavy stone piers could be reduced in 
size, the massive walls could be thinned down 
and cut out, until a new theory stood forth in 
practice — the building was no longer a roof 



OF MEDIAEVAL EUBOPE. 823 

resting on heavy walls propped up by thick 
piers that were themselves bound and dove- 
tailed into the walls. It was now a great, 
open, airy framework, in which the tall main 
arches were caught precisely at their weakest 
point by slender but strong abutting piers. The 
roof rested partly on these arches thus secured, 
partly on slight but strong shafts engaged in 
the masonry of the great arches at their spring- 
ing point. Across the nave independent arches 
were thrown, always pointed, that showed be- 
neath each vault, upheld it, and produced the 
new and artistic effect of groining. The light 
spaces of the clerestory were now raised and 
widened ; the spaces between the great lateral 
arches were also broadened, until at last almost 
no solid wall at all was left, nothing but the 
masonry built up beneath the huge glass win- 
dows to support their weight, and enclose the 
worshippers. Here at last was something abso- 
lutely new in architecture. Some modern schol- 
ars maintain that its first suggestions came from 
Constantinople, or from Christian Antioch. Be 
that as it may, it was the genius of mediaeval 
Catholicism in the West that caught up the idea 
long dormant. In Normandy and the territory 
of Paris and Orleans, the new architecture first 



324 THE CATHEBBAL-BUILBERS 

spread. It is not German, it is not Italian or 
English. It is French in its original and purest 
monuments. When we look at the cathedrals 
of Chartres and Amiens, we see its loveliest 
chefs d'oeuvre ; when we go through the an- 
cient towns of Normandy, we see its first ex- 
amples. Here in the north of France, during 
the first fifty years of its development, arose 
many specimens of the genuine Gothic, until 
all Europe caught the sacred fire. The new style 
spread from one land to another, was modified 
somewhat in each, reached its apogee in the 
early part of the fourteenth century, and then 
fell into a decline and disuse that it has re- 
covered from only in the last century through 
the efforts of a Pugin in England and that 
Eomantic movement in Germany which is iden- 
tified with the completion of the cathedral of 
Cologne and the names of Joseph Gorres, its 
philosopher, and August Eeichensperger, its 
preceptor. ' 

The mediaeval cathedral, house of prayer, 
museum, gallery of art works, in whatever way 
we look at it, was the great popular enterprise 
of that period. It arose gradually, through 
several generations, and is the true mirror of 
the ideals and endeavors of our mediaeval an- 



OF MEDIEVAL JBUBOPK 325 

cestors. It furnished employment for the major 
part of the city's craftsmen. It stirred up 
rivalry and ingenuity, and brought together 
on one site a multitude of workers whose com- 
bined experience alone could raise such build- 
ings. Industry and commerce flourished around 
it, good taste was exercised and developed by 
it — the great triumphs of painting and sculp- 
ture in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries 
are only the flowering of the good seed planted 
in the twelfth and thirteenth. The life of every 
family in the city was intimately bound up with 
the great monument that they had helped to 
build. Its windows held the portraits of their 
ancestors. Their arms were blazoned on many 
a glorious rose or chancel-light, while before 
the altar lay buried their parents and relatives. 
When Adam KrafEt raised his ineffably beautiful 
slender tabernacle for the Blessed Sacrament at 
Nurnberg, that reaches from floor to ceiling of 
the great church, he built it on the backs 
of bronze figures of himself and his assistants, 
each with his master's apron and tools. From 
his workshop to the altar of God there was but 
a step in his lifetime. And he wished it to be 
so forever. 

It is the cathedral that kept alive good handi- 



326 THE CATREDBAL-BUILDEBS 

work, for all the domestic architecture, all civic 
and military architecture, of the period is based 
on the religious, and only follows it, imitates 
it. The castle, the fortress, the city palace, the 
town-hall, the gates, the bridges, the guild-houses, 
all the civic buildings, copy their ornaments and 
decoration from the workshops of the cathedral, 
when, indeed, they were not built by the same 
architects and workmen. There they found the 
infinite variety of decoration, the models of 
bronze and iron work, the perfect forms of 
pointed window and stone mullion, the propor- 
tion of stories and cornice, the proper precautions 
for the roof and the eaves, the charming system 
of fresco-coloring and painted tile-work that lent 
to every old mediaeval town, like Bruges or Frei- 
burg, its haunting spiritualesque beauty, its dis- 
tinctive cachet of personality. 

This helps to explain another peculiarity of 
the great Gothic cathedrals. They had no ar- 
chitects in our modem sense of the word. There 
was, indeed, a great head whose general plans 
were known and followed out. But it was a 
time of master loorkmen. Every one fit to do 
any responsible work on the building was a fin- 
ished artist in his own line. Moreover, he had 
usually a heart and an imagination, those true 



OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE. 327 

sources of spontaneity and inventiveness. He 
had a personal fondness for his work, and a great 
pride in being a responsible agent in the com- 
mon undertaking. The individual workmen had 
much freedom in the execution of their details, a 
circumstance that aided notably in impressing an 
air of distinction, a stamp of personal inventive 
finish, on every line and member of the work. 
Around such buildings as Strasburg and Paris, 
that were slowly carried to completion, arose 
practical schools of superior masonry, joiner and 
cabinet work, framing and mortising, carving in 
wood and stone. Originally all the workmen 
formed one great corporation, but in time the 
painters and the sculptors became conscious of 
their own importance, and established indepen- 
dent guilds or crafts. So with the others. But 
their real apprenticeship had been on the huge 
pile that overtopped everything in the city, and 
their best masterpieces were long to be seen 
only there. Sometimes one family worked for 
two hundred years or more at one particular line 
of occupation in the same building. Thus, all 
the mosaic altars in the great Certosa at Pavia 
were built from father to son for two hundred 
years by the Sacchi family. A moment's reflec- 
tion will show that in such cases we almost touch 



328 THE CATHEDEAL-BUILDERS 

with the hand the original workmen of the thir- 
teenth century. Elsewhere, in Northern Italy, 
one family built during three hundred years 
nearly all the fine churches of a whole extensive 
neighborhood. 

It is not enough that we should know how a 
great cathedral got itself built up. It is well to 
know how it was administered and kept together. 
After all, it was a centre of good government, 
when good government was rare. At its head 
stood the bishop, elected for life. He was often 
a sovereign temporal authority, like the Bishop 
of Durham in England, or the great German 
elector-bishops of Cologne, Trier, and Mainz. 
In any case his authority was the source of all 
rights, and his will the normal spring of admin- 
istration. For many centuries all his clerics 
lived with him, ate at the same table, and slept 
under the same roof. The temporal goods of the 
see were under the supervision of an officer 
known as the archdeacon, who also looked after 
the clergy. A cathedral school, where boys were 
brought up as in a seminary, where the young 
choristers were trained, was attached to the build- 
ing. Other buildings were close by, apartments 
for the clergy of the cathedral, a house for the 
guests, the pilgrims, the poor penitent travelling 



OF MEDIMVAL EUBOPE, 329 

to Eome or to St. James in Spain. In Eng- 
land a noble circular hall, whose roof was 
upheld by a single pillar, was affected to the 
meetings of the clergy and to the synods. Nu- 
merous officials were on the personnel of the cathe- 
dral — a master of the choir or precentor (a very 
important office), a chancellor or legal adviser 
and officer of the diocese, a treasurer, a dean or 
head of the chapter with its numerous priests or 
canons bound to sing the psalms at fixed times 
during the day, and to carry on the services of 
the cathedral according to the laws of the Church » 
A great number of laymen were usually attached 
to such a building— caretakers, janitors, laborers, 
bailiffs, messengers — sometimes the family of 
the bishop ran up to many hundred heads. A 
great wall was often drawn about the whole 
establishment, and the gates closed and patrolled 
at night as in a little fortress. With daybreak 
began the round of divine service that almost 
never ceased, the space between the High Mass 
and the Evensong or Vespers being filled up with 
many minor and local ceremonies of great inter- 
est — in England, e.g. the distribution of the 
Holy Loaf, the chanting of the lovely Bidding 
Prayer, or public petitions for divine mercy, 
the calling over from the pulpit of the Bede-RoU 



330 THE CATHEDBAL-BUILDER8 

or names of dead benefactors, the chanting of 
litanies, the conduct of processions, and a hun- 
dred and one forms of religious life that kept 
the entire clerical force on their feet the livelong 
day. Besides the varied religious life of the 
cathedral itself, there was the wonderful social 
life without — the weekly market, the pedlers 
and tradesmen, the ale-house that often belonged 
to the church, the great breweries for a people 
who seldom drank water, like the English and 
the Germans, the children at their games, the 
smithies wide open and resounding, the granaries 
and stores of the bishop. Between that cathe- 
dral and the next great church, there were only 
hamlets, some monasteries, small ones maybe, 
and an occasional nobleman's castle perched in- 
accessible on some high crag. As a matter of 
fact, here were the original elements of mediaeval 
civil life, hej-e the germs out of which grew first 
most mediaeval cities and small States of Europe, 
and then our own civilization. When a man of 
learning and distinction, of high birth and great 
piety, like a Grosseteste of Lincoln, or a Maurice 
de Sully of Paris, or an Engelbert of Cologne, 
presided over such a work, one can imagine how 
close to ideal contentment the life of his people 
could come. 



OF MEDIEVAL EUBOPE. 331 

The decorations and furniture of the cathedral 
corresponded to the beauty of the structure. 
The altar arose on marble or bronze columns, 
sometimes resting on couchant lions or on human 
figures. Eeliefs in marble or bronze decorated 
it. The costliest embroideries and laces were 
made for it; stuffs of gold brocade, and orna- 
mented with precious stones, were hung upon it, 
worth a king's ransom. Embroidered frames, 
richly painted panels, were often used to embel- 
lish it on high festivals. Often a great balda- 
chino, or open roof, held up by colmnns of costly 
material covered it. In Germany and elsewhere 
the altar worked gradually back from the front 
line to the wall of the apse, whither the relics 
were taken. In time they were put upon the 
altar itself, and thus arose the elegant r credos. 
It is all visible in the painted folding-doors that 
may yet be seen — lovely work by the schools of 
Cologne or of Bruges, of Hans Memling or Al- 
bert Diirer. The chalices of silver and gold were 
gems of artistic skill, covered with precious 
stones, engraved in niello, heavy with pearls 
and mosaic, decorated in arabesque or filigree. 
Though the smallest of them was of inestimable 
value, yet the richest was looked on as all 
too unfit for the holy service it rendered. From 



332 THE CATHEDBAL-BUILDERS 

being round and large they became tall and 
slender, according as they were more immediately 
for the personal use of the celebrant. The cibo- 
rium for the communion of the people, the pyx 
for the communion of the sick, the monstrance 
for the benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, 
were each a new object for the artist's taste and 
the generosity of the donor. For all of them 
the pointed arch of the Gothic fixed the shape 
and the details. \ The Mass and service books 
were of enormous size, made of the finest parch- 
ment, illuminated by. the deftest hands, bound 
and ornamented with lavish fondness and a skill 
never since surpassed. Every vessel that was in 
any way connected with the eucharistic service 
became at once an art-object — the censer, the 
cruets, the basin, and even the candlesticks and 
candelabra, the Mass bells, the portable crosses, 
the reUquaries. Even when done in iron or 
brass, like the massive lecterns, these objects 
affected the most exquisite forms, and were the 
starti!ng-point of the loveliest work that later 
generations expended on domestic interiors, or 
on buildings devoted to civic purposes. The 
baptismal fonts, round or octagonal, offered 
the sculptor an interesting field for his inven- 
tive genius, and even the well, always found in 



OF MEDIJEVAL EUROPE, 

the cathedral cloister or close, was often seized 
on for purposes of sculptural decoration. The 
empty spaces in the cathedral were gradually 
filled with splendid family tombs of marble or 
bronze, on which the symbolism of religion and 
heraldry disputed the palm with the truth and 
vividness of portraiture and history. The dead 
bishop and his canons were in time remembered 
for their services or their legacies. Thus every 
cathedral was soon a city of the dead, where the 
effigies of priest and layman, of abbess and noble 
dame, looked down from their silent places on 
the ebb and flow of the human life that they had 
once graced and enlivened. Never was there a 
more moving and romantic lesson of the tran- 
sient nature of life than these great cathedral- 
spaces in their first days when the dead builders 
stared on the living, and the living felt that day 
by day they were only drawing closer to the 
beloved dead. Over them all there is even yet 
something of a sacrosanct Christian fondness — 
the knight cherishes yet his falcon or his hound ; 
at the feet of the sweet' chatelaine is yet carved 
the little spaniel, the companion of her leisure 
and the witness of her womanly virtues. 

The railings of the choir, and the screens to 
separate it from the people, the screens for the 



334 THE CATHEDEAL-BUILDEBS 

altar itself, the pulpit, the tabernacle, the read- 
ing desks for the daily office, the organ fronts, 
the stalls for the canons, the marble pavement, 
the entire furniture of the cathedral, were turned 
over to the artists as an inexhaustible province 
for their skill and genius. 

Two great arts formed a congenial home in the 
Gothic cathedral — the art of painting and the 
art of sculpture. The mediaeval man was color- 
mad. We see the relics of his great monuments 
in a faded or colorless garb. When they issued 
from the hands of the architects and artists they 
were far different. The roof of the cathedral 
was finished in colored tiles — red, blue, green — 
often in tasty designs. The walls within were 
tinted in fresh and pleasing colors, the carvings 
of the capitals brought out in red and blue and 
gold ; in the vaults the groined ribs of stone were 
similarly treated, — the doorways were painted 
and gilded, the pavements often done in mosaic, 
or in geometric patterns of colored marbles, the 
ceilings a deep blue, often dotted with little 
golden stars. Compositions of great size often 
adorned the vacant spaces — here the " Madonna 
and Child," there " St. Christopher bearing the 
Christ-Child," here the " Dance of Death " with its 
stern comment on the vanity of human life, else- 



OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE, 335 

where the prophets and apostles, or martyrs and 
holy virgins and confessors, met the eye. Some- 
times the interior is cold and severe, as at Mar- 
burg, and again a great blaze of blue and gold 
and red as at Assisi. It was the experience thus 
gained that prepared the way for the lovely 
Madonnas of the artists of Cologne and Bruges 
in the fifteenth century, the work of a Master 
Schongauer and a Hans Memling, without which 
a Diirer and a Eaphael would be unintelligible. 

Nevertheless, the real immortal painting of the 
Gothic cathedral is not the fresco, no matter how 
perfect. It is always somewhat out of place and 
distracts the attention from the sublime simplicity 
of the architectural lines, from the religious se- 
verity of the tall open arches and the sombre 
masses of stone. Its true and natural painting is 
the great glass window. Indeed, when finished, 
a genuine Gothic monument is like a vast trans- 
parent house of glass. Originally the aim of the 
artist in colored glass was to give the impression 
of a great piece of tapestry covering the open 
space and toning down the garish light of day. 
Such tapestries had been much used in the earlier 
Romanesque churches, and were one great source 
of artistic education in the numerous nunneries. 
The bits of glass were put together like a mosaic, 



336 THE CATHEDBAL-BUILDEB8 

each a separate bit, and leaded to one another. 
All drawing was in outline. It was a handsome 
shining tapestry that the artists desired to pro- 
duce, and such is always the effect of the best 
glass, as at Chartres and Cologne. Later, as the 
windows became only frames for the imitation of 
painting in oil, the original artistic reason of the 
great glass windows was forgotten. The acces- 
sory had become the principal. 

Although in the treatment of artistic glass, as 
in other details, there was in the fourteenth and 
fifteenth centuries a rapid decline of intelligence 
and pure taste, one great effect was retained in 
every church that could at all call itself Gothic — 
an abundance of light, but toned down, softened, 
robbed of all its heat and blare and vulgarity. 
An air of religious mystery was thus created 
throughout the vast building, in which all things 
were seen indeed, but dimly and with a constant 
suggestion of the beyond, of a glory and a majesty 
to which these walls were but the vestibule. 
The city streets usually led up to the great por- 
tals of the cathedral, so much so that in time the 
lofty transept became almost a highway for the 
ordinary foot-traffic of the community. The 
mighty collective work of the population was 
ever in their very heart, a thing of beauty and 



OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE. 337 

joy, all fresh and sharp in its carved surfaces, all 
grace and slender elegance in the upward sweep 
of its arches, its roof, its towers and spires, all 
solidity in its immovable piers and locked but- 
tresses, all variety in the flashing colors of the 
tiled roofs and spires, the native hues of the local 
freestone or granite, the broken lines of the ex- 
ternal framework, all utility in the thousand uses 
of daily life for which, little by little, every mei^- 
ber of the splendid pile had been excogitated, all 
harmony in the blending of imperishable mate- 
rial, plastic forms, moulding genius — one mighty 
architectonic idea imprisoned, but barely impris- 
oned, throbbing day and night with a celestial 
music akin to that which the starry spheres are 
said to emit in their courses. Its glorious chimes 
flung out the praises of God from a perfect metal, 
the like of which has never been reproduced in 
later centuries. But tha showering melodies that 
they loosened in the upper air were as silence 
compared with the voice of the vast mass itself. 
It was one great psalm of praise and prayer — 
the incarnation, as it were, of the divine psalmody 
that went ceaselessly on beneath its fretted and 
painted vaults. Not without reason has such a 
building been called a poem in stone. No ordi- 
nary poem indeed, but a solemn epic, in which all 



338 THE CATHEDBAL-BUILDEB8 

the uses of life are transfigured, smelted into 
unity, uplifted and set in living contact with 
the common Father in heaven. Chartres and 
Amiens, Eheims and Eouen, Cologne and Mar- 
burg, are as surely the interpreters of Catholicism 
in the Middle Ages as St. Thomas and Dante — 
nay, in one sense more so — for such solitary 
voices appealed largely to the reason, or to the 
reasoning fancy, whereas the Gothic cathedral 
soars at once beyond the weak discursive or ana- 
lytic methods, appeals at once to the common 
heart of the city, the multitude, to all its common 
emotions, all its collective experiences. It calls 
out all the idealism latent in the most sluggish 
soul. The history of the Catholic Church, seen 
from the proper view-point, is one of her greatest 
arguments, one of the deepest sources of her the- 
ology and her discipline. But its true folios are 
not the dusty volumes that lie upon the shelves 
of libraries. They are rather those great religious 
buildings of the Middle Ages, every one of which 
was a forum for the broadest discussions that 
could engage human thought, every one of which 
is as a leaf in the annals of her civilizing energy. 
Who can look upon the white head of Shasta and 
not feel that peace descends upon him and enfolds 
him with her wings ? So no one can suffer the 



OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE. 339 

vision of Strasburg or Freiburg, and not experi- 
ence a great stilling of the heart, a sensation as 
of a mother resting her soft palm on one's fevered 
brow and looking into the eyes miutterable 
thoughts of • pity and consolation and relief-. 

What is the cause of this sentiment so universal 
that it cannot be gainsaid ? It is something sim- 
ilar to the power exercised over the imagination 
by a battle-field, an Austerlita or Waterloo, by 
the ruins of some great city, Carthage or Antioch 
or Eome. There the most awful experiences of 
man with man have gradually but inseparably 
blended with the surroundings. Here the dealings 
of God with man lend an unspeakable dignity to 
the scene of such great mysteries. For centuries 
the Saviour of mankind has dwelt beneath those 
holy roofs until every detail, every ornament, 
every element, has become in some way familiar 
with Him. For centuries the sacraments of the 
Catholic Church have been administered at those 
altars, and her solemn services have resounded 
in every corner of those vast edifices. For cen- 
turies a public worship, the offering of the whole 
heart of man — the act of the society as of the 
family — has developed and grown in manifold 
novelty and charm. In all this long time those 
huge spaces have been the meeting-places of 



340 THE CATHEDEAL-BUILDEBS 

heaven and earth, and if some of the dust and 
stain of the material garment of man still cling 
to them, they are also full to overflowing of an- 
gelic presences and divine emanations. If the 
muddy currents of life have left .their irregular 
line along the foundations, there cling to every 
altar and shrine countless sighs of genuine repent- 
ance, of ecstatic fondness for Jesus, of longing 
to be one with Him. There is everywhere the 
aroma of human tears, and human sorrows that 
are beyond the poor relief of tears. There are 
the cries of oppressed innocence, of hunted virtue, 
of outraged justice, of equity foiled and scorned. 
If each of these noble buildings is a museum, a 
gallery, immeasurably more instructive than the 
big lumber-rooms which are dignified with such 
titles, it is also a battle-field, where the wrestlings 
of the spirit and the conquests of grace fill out 
the conflict. 

Of our poor little lives, made up of the smiles 
of joy and the tears of woe, the greater part is 
generally concern and sohcitude. Still, there is 
the usual percentage of recreation and merri- 
ment, without which each heart would cease to 
be social, and life become an utter burden. So 
it came about that the Gothic cathedral was not 
all a creation of unrelieved earnestness. True 



OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE. 341 

religion, though grave and thoughtful, is also 
joyous and refined. It has ever been a note of 
genuine Catholicism that it is in many things 
the enemy of the extreme, the philosophy of 
moderation. In its palmiest days the Gothic 
architecture made a place for the humorous and 
grotesque, unconsciously perhaps^ but instinc- 
tively. It was truly the expression of real life, 
public and private. So, with photographic ac- 
curacy, every side of that life must be repro- 
duced. By a great and natural law that ran 
through the building from corner-stone to spire, 
everything must be not only useful, but beauti- 
ful,, must be treated and finished artistically. 
For instance, the ugly water S230uts, originally 
of lead and marble, ran out eventually into 
monstrous heads known as gargoyles. All the 
fabled and fantastic beasts of the imagination 
were made to do similar service. The horror of 
sin, the reign of Satan, were here symbolized in 
a way that was dear to the mediaeval mind, quite 
attached to the external and visible, inexpe- 
rienced in the realm of pure reason and cold exact 
logic. Here were sermons in stone for the 
peasant as he looked up on market-day at the 
vast parapet of Rheims or Strasburg. Similarly, 
in a thousand corners of the building, the free- 



342 TJSE CATHEBBAL-BUILDEBS 

working fancy of the artist moulded itself in a 
multitude of caricatures either personal or sym- 
bolical. Sometimes the carving monk cut out a 
hideous head of his abbot, guilty of too severe 
principles, too much addicted to penances of bread 
and water. Sometimes the workmen made ridic- 
ulous figures of one another or gave flight to 
pure invention in the reign of the grotesque. 
Oftener, however, some general law of sym- 
bolism runs beneath all these excrescences of 
humor. The mediaeval man was very much 
addicted to satire of a drastic type. He must 
see his victim wince and writhe, must know that 
the stripe cut into the bone. Yet it was a very 
healthy thing, and if the clergy, as the ruling 
power, got their share, perhaps more than their 
just share, they did not complain. The severest 
caricatures are precisely on the carved seats of 
the great choir where the bishop and his priests 
might gaze almost hourly on them and remem- 
ber that the world had eyes and ears and a good 
smart tongue, even if it did not know Latin and 
could only pray on its beads. The cunning fox 
come to grief, the gaunt robber wolf laid low, 
the vanity of gluttony and impurity, the fate of 
pride and injustice, the shame of meanness and 
avarice, the comic effects of sk)th and stupidity, 



OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE, 343 

— all these and many other moral lessons were 
thereon written so large that he must be deaf 
indeed for whom the stone and wood of his very 
seat did not daily preach a convincing lesson, 
did not daily rouse the voice of conscience and 
the longing for a better life. 

Where did the funds come from that built these 
mighty edifices? Not a few were put up by 
royal generosity; others by public taxation. 
But even in such cases individual help was 
solicited and given very largely. We have yet 
the account-books of some of these enterprises, 
and the entries are very curious. Much of the 
material — the marble, granite, brick, wood — 
was contributed gratis. A multitude of peasants 
offered their horses and oxen and carts to trans- 
port the same, and when they were too poor to 
own such property, they gave their time and 
labor. Women and children even stood by to 
contribute such help as their weak hands might 
offer. Every one felt that here a solemn act of 
religion was going on, something that tran- 
scended all ordinary enterprises. With that 
strong collective sense that the Church has devel- 
oped, they moved on, as one man, to the crea- 
tion of a monument that should bear the stamp 
of faith — immortality, eternity. Hundreds of 



344 THE CATHEDBAL-BUILDEB8 

noble churches were built in this way, even in 
small villages. To build a large and lovely 
house of God, and to dwell within the shadow of 
its graceful spire, was the one common purpose 
of every community from Sicily to Norway. 
One deep vivifying current of religion surged 
through all Europe, and where it passed, edifices 
of the highest beauty arose, each an incarna- 
tion of profound religious temperament, each a 
phase of a social life that recognized gratefully 
the existence of God as the Father of human 
society, and the public duty of the latter to 
Him. The very poorest contributed — on the 
account-books we may yet read how one gave a 
bed, another a coat. The knight sacrificed his 
gilded helmet and his blade of Damascus, with 
his coat-of-mail. The parish priest gave up his 
tithes, the curate his modest salary. The lady 
sent in her laces and jewellery, the women of the 
people their little heirlooms of gold or silver, 
even such neat and desirable articles of clothing 
as they possessed. The farmer gave his best 
cow, the pedler offered a choice trinket, the 
serf came up with his weekly wages. And when 
men and women were too poor to give anything 
as individuals, they clubbed together in little 
associations. Their pennies soon swelled to 



OF MEDIEVAL EUBOPE. 345 

silver, and the silver was turned into gold, and 
with the gold they cast in their hearts, and so 
the stones of the building got each a tongue that 
is yet eloquent with^ praise of the popular devo- 
tion. Much of the money was gotten by the 
weekly auction of these articles that was carried 
on in the public square by the foreman of the 
works. Indeed, the whole enterprise was like a 
majestic social song, a solemn hymn, whose 
notes rose slowly and sweetly from the earth to 
heaven, telling of the transformation of avarice 
into open-handedness, of coarseness into refine- 
ment, of selfishness into altruism, of blank igno- 
rance and stupidity into a creative faith. Prayer 
and adoration, propitiation and gratitude, were 
finely blended in the great popular chorus. 
King and serf, princess and milkmaid, pope and 
poor sacristan — the whole of Europe moved in 
a vast procession before the throne of Jesus 
Christ, and cast each a stone on the memorial 
pile of religion. And, for the first time, the 
quasi-divine hand of art, made infinitely cunning, 
transformed these crude offerings into ten thou- 
sand caskets of rarest beauty, out of which rose 
forever the spiritual incense of love, the ravish- 
ing aroma of adoration, the delicate perfumes of 
humility and human charity, the sweet odor of 



346 THE CATEEBRAL-BXJILBEBS 

self-sacrifice. For a short time in the history of 
mankind art was truly a popular thing, truly an 
energizing softening influence on the common 
heart. Insensibly artistic skill became common 
and native. The hand of the European man 
was born plastic and artistic. His eye was 
saturated with the secrets of color, his imagina- 
tion crowded with the glories of form in line 
and curve, in mass and sweep. His own sur- 
roundings were insensibly dominated by the 
spirit of pure beauty. He was once more a 
Greek, only born again in Jesus, and seeing 
now, with -the divinely soft eyes of the God-man, 
a spiritual world of beauty that Phidias and 
Praxiteles may have suspected, but only in the 
vaguest manner. 

Who were the actual worTcmen on the cathedrals f ^ 
They were built by corporations of workingmen 
known as guilds. In the Middle Ages all life 
was organized, was corporative. As religion 
was largely carried on by the corporations of 
monks and friars, so the civic life and its duties 
were everywhere in the hands of corporations. 
It was not exactly a government of the multitude 
— that was abhorrent to the men of that time. 
It was rather an aristocratic democracy, a kind 
of government in which men shared authority 



OF MEDIEVAL EUBOPE. 347 

and power, according to the stake they had in 
the State, according to their personal intelligence 
and skill, and their personal utility or service- 
ableness to the common weal. 

These building corporations or guilds arose 
out of the very ancient unions of the stone- 
masons. Perhaps, very probably, these unions 
were never destroyed even by the first shock of 
barbarian conquest. On its very morrow palaces 
and churches and public buildings had to go up 
or be restored. It is certain that capable hands 
were forthcoming. In any case, the master- 
masons were more than mere stone-cutters. 
They were artists in the truest sense of the word. 
They must know the capacities of their material, 
its uses, its appliances, from the moment it is hewn 
out of the earth to the moment it shines in the 
wall, all elegance and strength. They were at 
once engineers and architects, designers and con- 
tractors. They are known simply as "Master" 
— no more. Master Arnulf builds the cathedral 
of Florence, Master Giotto builds its lovely 
tower or campanile. The masters are all bound 
together in a lifelong union. Their apprentices 
serve a long term of years, but they serve on all 
parts of the building. They can handle the 
trowel and the chisel, the pencil and brush, as well 



348 THE CATHEDEAL-BUILDEBS 

as the jack-plane and the hammer. Never was 
there so unique and so uplifting an education of 
the senses as that of the mediaeval apprentice. 
One day he will appear in the weekly meeting 
of the guild, and exhibit some object that he has 
himself made. It must be useful, and it must 
be beautiful. It must differ from all similar 
work, must have an air of distinction, be some- 
thing highly personal and characteristic. This 
is the masterpiece, the proof that he is fit to 
apply for work in London or Dublin, Paris or 
Milan. It may be a hinge or a door-knob, a 
carved head or a tool, a curious bit of fr^aming 
or a specimen of filigree. It is judged by the 
criteria I have mentioned, judged by his peers and 
elders. If accepted, he passes into their society, 
and is assured of occupation for his lifetime. 

He will now attend the meetings, pay his 
dues to support the sick and crippled members, 
assist with advice and help at the general con- 
sultations, devote his whole time and being to 
the progress of the cathedral. Whether stone- 
cutter, carver, joiner, ironsmith, goldsmith, 
cabinet-maker, it is all one. The building arts 
are equal, ensouled by one spirit, and aiming at 
one end. For the present, there is but one 
corporation on the building. It includes all the 



OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE. 349 

workers, and is divided into masters, apprentices, 
and administration. This is the Lodge, the 
Banhutte, the Laubia or covered cloister — like 
the covered walk quite common in North Italian 
cities — where the finer carving was done, . the 
plans kept and studied, and moneys taken in, 
the wages paid out, and the whole work or 
"opera" administered. The shed that yet pro- 
tects our stone-masons when engaged at a public 
work is « the modern equivalent of the mediaeval 
Lodge. 

On signing the articles of the union or giiild, 
he wijl learn that it is intensely religious, that 
he must attend Mass Sundays and holydays, 
lead a moral and Catholic life, abstain from 
swearing, drunkenness, and immorality. He will 
learn that the guild supports its own chapel and 
priest to say an early Mass daity for them. He 
will be told that the Lodge, or workshop, is like 
a hall of justice, where the rights of each man, 
above all his free personality, must be respected. 
He will learn that all teaching is free to ap- 
prentices, and that, while there is a preference 
for the sons or relatives of the masters, natural 
aptitude and vocation are especially sought for. 
All this he will learn at Ely or Peterborough as 
well as at Toledo or Burgos. 



350 THE CATHEDRAL-BUILDEBS 

Each guild was under the protection of the 
Blessed Trinity and some saint. It had solemn 
services once a year in honor of its patron. It 
bm-ied solemnly its members, and held anniver- 
sary services. Gradually its own chapel became 
the centre of its religious life, whose details were 
carried on by its own priests. Religion covered 
every act of its corporate life — and in the 
palmy days of the great guilds their self-con- 
sciousness was striking. They bowed to the 
bishop, indeed, and the pope, king, or emperor, 
who were often included as members of their 
roll-call — but he was truly a strong parish 
priest or abbot whose authority they consented 
to acknowledge. 

In the guild meetings a regular and perfect 
administration, of great probity and equity, went 
on, almost unremunerated. The number of ap- 
prentices, the time of their service and the 
degree of their graduation, the quality and 
quantity of work in each line, the disputes and 
quarrels between all workmen, the wages 
and the sick dues, the charity allowances, the 
expenses of religion, of feasts and amusements, 
of pubhc contributions — all these came up in 
due order, and were one open source of popular 
education for the uses of real life. 



OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE, 351 

The guild, being a principal element of the 
civic life, soon had its badges of office, its mace 
and golden collar, its chains and rings, its great 
drinking-horns and table-plate of gold and 
silver, its countless beautiful masterpieces. It 
grew rich in lands and revenues, and was a 
factor to be counted with in every great struggle 
of the municipal life. In Italy the guilds play 
a principal role in the fierce historical warfare of 
Guelf and Ghibelline, the adherents of the pope 
and the partisans of the emperor. They are 
concerned in every social and political move- 
ment, sometimes on the right side, sometimes on 
the wrong, and it is largely in their history that 
must be studied the fatal decay of the democratic 
spirit of the High Middle Ages. 

It is not my purpose to treat of their decline, 
and the reasons for it — that chapter of their 
history is highly instructive even now. Suffice 
it to know that they were the real builders of 
the cathedral; that the principles and spirit 
of genuine Christian brotherhood were long the 
bond that held them together ; that they were 
the creation of Catholicism at the height of its 
earthly power; that they looked on mutual 
respect and helpfulness as essential to society; 
that they held labor to be the noblest of human 



352 TEE CATHEDBAL-BUILBEES 

things ; that they looked on beauty as an essential 
of true labor, its smile of contentment, its act of 
divine adoration; that they were guided by a 
sense of moderation and fairness in all their 
dealings ; that waste of time and dilapidation of 
material were looked on as sinful and shameful ; 
that in them each man felt himself a living self- 
determining element, a member of the whole 
work, and threw himself into it with a vigor and 
earnestness at once entire and affectionate. 

Thus the building arose in an atmosphere of 
religion, all its lines laid by men to whom its 
future uses were sacred, whose families threw 
back into the common treasury the surplus of 
the master's earnings. It was a great trust that 
was laid on the city — and its execution brought 
out in the citizens many of the virtues that a 
trust creates — a sense of responsibility, pruden- 
tial measures, economic foresight, calm and large 
and disinterested counsel. In so far as we 
inherit many distinctive traits of this kind from 
our ancestors, it is the mediaBval church-building 
that helped originally to create them. 

In her great cathedrals, therefore, the Catholic 
Church has created durable edifices of popular 
utility and perfect beauty. The old philosophers 
used to say that the beautiful was the splendor 



OF MEBIMVAL EUROPE. 353 

of the true^ in which case the truth of Catholicism 
as the genuine religion of the people would be 
amply vouched for. All the arts are dependent 
on architecture and conditioned by it. Without 
its great spaces there is neither monumental 
painting nor sculpture, neither music in its high- 
est forms nor the dramatic movement of public 
worship. In creating the noble cathedrals of 
Europe Catholicism thus created the fine arts, 
or at least was their nurse and protector. 
Music, indeed, is absolutely her creation, and 
can never utterly break away from its original 
home, however wild and wayward it may seem. 
It is not the pipes of Pan nor th'e songs of 
Apollo that echo even in our most debased 
modern music. It is the psalm of David, the 
canticle of the martyr, the praiseful hymn of the 
morning and the calm sad song of evening. 

The cathedral was the workshop of the Church 
during the Middle Ages. It was vast because 
she had the whole city to train up. It was 
open on all sides, because she was the common 
mother of civil society. It was high because 
she aimed at uplifting both mind and heart, and 
making for them a level just below the angelical 
and celestial. It was manifold in its members 
and elements, for she permeated all society and 



354 THE CATHEDBAL-BUILDERS. 

clialleng^d every activity and every interest. It 
was all lightsome and soaring, because it was 
the spiritual mountain top whence the soul 
could take its flight to the unseen world of light 
and joy. It was long drawn out because the 
long journey of life ends happily only for those 
who rest in Jesus. It lay everywhere cruciform 
on the earth, for the shadow of the cross falls 
henceforth over all humanity, blessing, enfold- 
ing, saving. Never did any institution create a 
monument that more thoroughly expressed its 
own scope and aims than the Catholic religion, 
when it uplifted the great mediaeval cathedral. 
It is said that since the unity of Christendom 
was broken at the Eeformation no more har- 
monious bells have been cast like those of the 
Middle Ages. So, too, no more great cathedrals 
have arisen — in more senses than one the mould 
was broken from whence they came, the deep, 
universal, practical, intensely spiritual faith of 
humanity that for once transcended race and 
nation, set aside the particular and discordant, 
and created things of absolute harmony, and 
therefore of beauty as absolute as man may 
evoke from the objects of sense. 



THE KESULTS OF THE CRUSADES. 

If the venerable cathedrals of Europe are the 
highest expression of the domestic or internal 
life of mediasval Catholicism, the Crusades are 
its principal public and political enterprise. By 
the Crusadeswe understand great armed expedi- 
tions of Christian Europe, undertaken at the 
command or suggestion of the pope, with the 
purpose of rescuing the Holy Land from the con- 
trol of the Mussulmans. They were originally 
meant as pious and religious works. Whoever 
joined them wore upon his breast a cross of red 
cloth, and vowed to fight for the sepulchre of 
Jesus Christ and never to return to Europe 
before he had prayed within its holy precincts. 
They cover a period of two hundred years — the 
twelfth and the thirteenth centuries, during 
which time all Europe resounded to the tread of 
martial men, and the sublime cry of " God wills 
it, God wills it " was heard from Sicily to Nor- 
way. In this period the whole cycle of human 
passions was aroused, every human interest found 

355 



356 TRE RESULTS OF THE CBtfSADES, 

a voice and every human activity a channel or 
outlet. 

In these two hundred years took place the 
transition of the Eu.ropean man from youtk to 
manhood. He enters upon the twelfth century 
a creature of the heart, of sentiment and emo- 
tion, ignorant of the great world beyond his 
little hamlet or castle. He emerges from the 
thirteenth century, both layman and ecclesiastic, 
with world-wide experience, a clearer view of 
the relations of society to history and geography, 
and with new qualities of mind and heart. The 
Crusades were often very human enterprises, and 
more than once degenerated from their sacred 
character, to become insteuments of injustice and 
political folly. They have their dark and re- 
grettable phases, and perhaps their influence has 
been, on given occasions and in given circum- 
stances, detrimental. This is no more than can 
be said of many great historical movements, 
laudable in their spirit and original intention, 
only to degenerate with time and the irresistible 
force of circumstances or environment. Taken 
as a whole, they are the most important collec- 
tive enterprise in the history of European man- 
kind. They were an official work of Catholicism, 
as represented by its Supreme Head, the Bishop 



THE RESULTS OF THE CBUSADES. 357 

of Eome. He first instigated them; he roused 
the timid^ hesitating kings and nobles; his letters 
awakened the Cathohc multitudes in every land; 
his spiritual favors attracted them about the 
banners of their kings and princes; his legates 
marched at the head of every expedition. When 
all others grew weary and faint-hearted, he 
maintained courage and resolution. When cu- 
pidity and self-interest supplanted the original 
motives of faith and devotion to the Holy Land, 
he constantly recalled the true significance of 
these warlike expeditions. Whether the Cru- 
sades were the beginnmg of his great power in 
the Middle Ages, or the first step to the ship- 
wreck of it, he was always their central figure. 
The public life of these two centuries really re- 
volved about two poles — Eome and Jerusalem. 

The peoples of mediaeval Europe, like all 
simple peoples with their life-experience before 
them, were genuine hero-worshippers. They were 
feudal and mihtary in their organization, very 
ardent, sympathetic, and mobile. Eehgion was 
intelligible, tangible, in their saints and martyrs, 
just as the State secured their loyalty in and 
through the persons of their leaders, their counts, 
dukes, princes, and kings. Loyalty was prima- 
rily to fixed persons in whom ideals and institu- 



858 THE BESULTS OF THE CRUSADES, 

tions were incarnate ; to be a " masterless man " 
was equivalent to outlawry. Devotion and self- 
sacrifice were for persons and places — they had 
not yet learned to divide the abstract idea from 
its concrete expression. 

From their conversion to Catholicism these 
peoples had cherished an intense devotion to the 
person of Jesus Christ. He is their King who 
makes war against Satan, and the apostles 
are His thanes, His generals, His counts and 
barons. His benign figure looks down from 
every altar, is enthroned in every apse, 
is sculptured on the walls and uplifted 
over the doorway of every church. The first 
document of romantic theology is the well-known 
prologue to the law of the Salic Franks. Since 
then all royal documents begin in His name, all 
wills and testaments confess Him in their open- 
ing paragraph. He is the beloved ideal of every 
heart, the burden of every discourse, the key-note 
of every immortal hymn. The first monument 
of mediaeval Teutonic literature is the noble 
gospel-paraphrase of the ninth century known as 
the '' Heliand " — in it Jesus Christ is the 
heavenly war-lord, worthy of all " Treue," sym- 
bol and fountain of all " Ehre." We shall never 
understand the Crusades unless we grasp firmly 



THE RESULTS OF THE CBUSADES. 359 

the fact that the Middle Ages were a period 
of most universal and sincere devotion to the 
person of Jesus Christ. 

In such a world it was only natural that the 
severe penances needed to rouse a sense of sin in 
those rude and coarse natures should often take 
the form of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land where 
Jesus was born^ lived, and died. As the Middle 
Ages wore away, these pilgrimages grew in size 
and frequency. With the new religious spirit 
that created so many splendid churches in the 
twelfth and thirteenth centuries coincided some 
other things. The popes had taken the popular 
side in their long struggle with the German 
emperors, and had won the immediate victory. 
The great abbots of Cluny had aroused a new 
life all over Europe by their piety and that of 
the hundreds of monasteries which acknowl- 
edged their rule of life. After a long period of 
political inferiority and internal anarchy, the 
States of the West, disorganized since the death 
of Charlemagne, began to realize their strength. 
Vaguely it was felt that some common -enter- 
prise was needed to gather up all these new 
forces and currents. 

In the great soul of Gregory VII., the man 
who more thoroughly than any other resumed 



360 THE BESULT8 OF THE CBTTSADES. 

the traditions and temper of the best Catholi- 
cism that preceded him, while he gave the 
watchwords for the centuries to come, this 
common enterprise was already clearly outlined, 
as early as the last quarter of the eleventh cen- 
tury. He saw that it would be better to con- 
sume the ardor and energy of men like the 
young and violent Henry lY. of Germany in 
efforts against a public, common, and threaten- 
ing enemy, than to go on indefinitely in domes- 
tic broils and dissensions, Christian fighting 
against Christian, while all around the Medi- 
terranean the Moslem was gradually spreading 
his power, and already threatened from very 
near that city of Constantinople which had so 
long been the bulwark of all the Christian popu- 
lation of the West. Indeed, the action of 
Sylvester II., the famous Gerbert (999-1003), 
would lead us to suspect that since the days of 
Gregory II., the " nee dicendi Hagareni " of the 
Liber Pontificalis had found in the papacy their 
native enemy. Islam was above all a religion, 
a warlike one in its essence and all its history, 
whose prosperity could only be gained at the 
expense of Christendom. 

The time of Gregory YII. seemed also a favor- 
able moment for the reunion of the Western and 



THE BESITLTS OF THE CBTTSADES. 361 

Eastern Churches. Scarce two hundred years had 
passed since the death of Photius, the scholarly 
but infamous man who had caused the breach 
that still lies open, and withdrawn the Christian 
peoples of the East from their union with the 
head of the Christian religion, the successor of 
St. Peter. Constantinople was now in sore need 
of help against the warlike Seljuk Turks, who 
had been encroaching very deeply on Asia Minor, 
and also held all the overland Toads to Syria and 
Palestine. This great city, the London of the 
Middle Ages, had exhausted its means and its 
armies. On nearly every side the world of 
Islam was surrounding it like a moving bog, 
slowly but surely. Four centuries of super- 
human efforts, of wonderful ingenuity, of diplo- 
macy, had not availed to stave off the day of 
reckoning that began when Mohammed haugh- 
tily ordered the Eoman emperor of his own day 
to do him homage. As a matter of fact it took 
four more centuries to reduce the Royal City 
beneath the Crescent — but the tide was already 
turning that way, and at Constantinople people, 
patriarchs, and emperors recognized too well the 
painful fact, though they could never fully recon- 
cile themselves to it, nor adopt the proper meas- 
ures of reconciliation with the West. Is not the 



362 THE BESULTS OF THE CBU8ADES, 

secret of it all in those terrible pages of Liud- 
prand of Cremona ? In them there breathe yet 
the racial contempt of the Greek for the Frank, 
the hoarded hope of vengeance, the senseless 
pride of origin, the bitter resentment of the 
transfer of loyalty by the Eoman See, the angry 
despair at the sight of a free and vigorous West. 
If Rome and Jerusalem were the poles aroimd 
which revolves the history of the Crusades, the 
city of Constantiilople is the key to their failure. 
In these two centuries many thousands of armed 
knights on horseback gave up their lives to the 
Crusades. Countless thousands of foot-soldiers 
and camp-followers, pilgrims and the like, per- 
ished in the attempt to free the holy places. 
There were two ways to reach Jerusalem, one 
by land down the Danube and through Thrace 
to Constantinople, thence over Asia Minor into 
Syria ; the other by sea from Venice or Genoa, 
which cities alone had fleets of transport galleys 
in those days. For the first century the Cru- 
saders went by land. Arrived at Constanti- 
nople, they abandoned themselves, too often, to 
excess, after the fatigues and privations of the 
long journey. The roads were poor and they 
were ignorant of the local topography. The 
populations they passed through were also igno- 



THE BESULTS OF THE CEUSADES, 363 

rant, and often hostile. This was especially the 
case as they left behind them the uncertain 
boundaries of the West and approached the 
territory of Constantinople and the sphere of 
its influence. The semi-barbarian world of 
Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Balkans was deeply 
troubled at their coming. Indeed, they were 
rightly troubled, for the military chiefs of the 
Crusaders too often had views differing from 
those of the pious clergy and people. Not 
always were their ambitions bounded by that 

" Sepulchre in stubborn Jewry 
Of the world's ransom, blessed Mary's Son." 

They were mostly men of Norman blood or 
descent. State-destroyers and State-makers by 
profession. Many dreamed of new and rich 
feudal principalities, of independent sovereign- 
ties, of a golden life in the dreamy Orient. 
The law or custom of primogeniture, the feudal 
customs in favor of the eldest son, threw regu- 
larly a multitude of young ambitious men upon 
the theatre of European affairs, brothers of 
kings, nephews of queens, a mob of landless, 
disinherited men, and women too, for whom for- 
tune lay in the future and far away. They were 
the Conquistadori of the Middle Ages ; to their 
ambitious, unholy, and evil counsels and pur- 



364 THE BESULTS OF THE CBUSADES. 

poses is owing largely the failure of the religious 
scope of the Crusades. Between them on the 
one side and the churchmen on the other there 
was friction that often led to the gravest disasters. 

It was in the time of the Crusades as in all 
other periods of human history — the genuine 
praiseworthy aims of religion were often per- 
verted by the human instruments which acted 
in her name. The noble and useful ideals set 
forth at Rome and preached by a St. Bernard, 
the high political advantages of the same, were 
perverted in the execution. Jerusalem was lost 
because a Bohemond or a Tancred set more store 
by a little feudal estate on the coast of Syria 
than by the real object of his vow. The Mos- 
lem's hour of division and weakness was allowed 
to go by because Venice was jealous of the com- 
mercial superiority of Constantinople, and plun- 
dered pitilessly, first the Crusaders themselves, 
and then her ancient suzerain, the great Royal 
City that, after all, had enabled Venice to rise 
by restraining the naval ambition of the Mos- 
lems, and preventing the Mediterranean from 
becoming the great lake of Islam, its easy high- 
way into all Europe. 

The Crusaders themselves, too often, listened 
to very earthly and low passions, and dissipated 



THE RESULTS OF THE CBUSABES. 365 

their numbers and strength, before they came 
within sight of the Holy City. They carried 
along with them old burdens of jealousy, hatred, 
revenge, from their French or German homes. 
Upon the soil of Syria they cherished their 
traditional European policies and combinations. 
Their councils were usually divided — those 
highly personal men who never recognized any 
superior law at home, except through fear, were 
unlikely to bear the yoke of subordination 
abroad. Could Homer have arisen he would 
have seen before Jerusalem or St. Jean d'Acre 
as before Iliqn, no fewer armies than there were 
kings and princes, as many independent divisions 
as there were banners of great knights, as many 
sulking chiefs as there were disappointed ambi- 
tions. Many of them had never seen a great 
eity. At that time all the cities of Europe were 
not worth, in wealth or luxury, the single city 
of Constantinople. Its brilliant civilization had 
never known interruption from the day of its 
foundation. As in modern London, the fatten- 
ing currents of commerce had been flowing into 
it from the East and the West for seven hundred 
years and more. Its hundreds of splendid 
churches were almost equalled by the splendid 
civic buildings. The masterpieces of antiquity, 



366 THE RESULTS OF THE CBUSABES, 

the rich literature of ancient Greece, the tradi- 
tions of all the arts, the high aristocratic sense 
of superiority, seemed to justify the proud atti- 
tude of the citizens toward these uneducated 
and coarse multitudes from the West. 

A profound dislike, an almost inexplicable 
hatred of the Bishop of Rome, has always char- 
acterized the Greek clergy of Constantinople. 
Their claim was always that the clergy of the 
New Rome was the equal in authority and the 
superior in learning and refinement of the clergy 
of Old Rome. Here, by the Golden Horn, the 
traditions of the ancient imperial government 
were never broken, never forgotten.- Each 
Christian emperor felt that he was the genuine 
successor of Julius Caesar and Augustus. The 
Western nations — England, France, Germany, 
Italy — were to him revolted provinces, that 
some mysterious design of God tolerated. No 
emperor of Constantinople ever willingly ad- 
dressed the German successors of Charlemagne 
as emperor, only as king. In theory, the Greek 
emperor was himself the master of the civilized 
universe. This, too, although century by century 
his civil power waned. North, South, East, and 
West, the limits of empire were pared away. 
But the Romaic Cassar at Constantinople only 



THE RESULTS OF TEE CRUSADES, 367 

gathered with more dignity the folds of his 
purple robes, and prepared to perish with more 
fortitude amid the rising tides of modern bar- 
barism. There is nothing more pathetic in 
history than this survival of ancient . ideals and 
habits of political life. The aristocracy of Con- 
stantinople was politically rotten to the core, 
yet it remained stoically contemptuous of its 
Latin conquerors, from the impregnable strong- 
holds of its own mind and heart. The mediaeval 
knight might have saved Constantinople, if the 
classic soul of Old Rome, proud and exclusive, 
had not been so deeply infused into the organism 
of her prouder daughter, the New Rome. It 
was in the time of the Crusades, as it is to-day 
with the Greek clergy of that city — better a 
hundred times the rule of the Crescent than any 
subjection to the pope, better the sour bread of 
slavery and oppression than any recognition of 
the descendants of the Goths and Vandals. 

In the beginning there was almost no order or 
harmony among the chiefs of the Crusades, and 
when they reached the Royal City, their own 
greedy passions and its great weakness conspired 
to make them common pillagers, thieves, and 
oppressors. To get rid of them the wily Greeks 
induced them to cross the Bosphorus, led them 



368 THE RESULTS OF THE CRUSADES. 

against the hordes of Turks, then betrayed and 
abandoned them. These new protectors of the 
Greeks were worse than then* old enemies. So 
the bones of entire armies soon whitened the 
plains of Asia Minor. By thousands the simple- 
hearted but ignora]it knights of France, England, 
and Germany paid with their lives for their tur- 
bulent career in Constantinople, for their impoli- 
tic insults to the Greek who did not acknowledge 
the Bishop of Rome as head of the Christian 
religion, for their innocent trust in the leadership 
of some Byzantine general. 

In the next century the Crusaders usually 
take the fleets of Venice or Genoa to cross 
the Mediterranean — but at an enormous ex- 
pense. Once, indeed, Venice tempted them to 
overthrow the Christian Empire at Constanti- 
nople, which was now her commercial rival. In 
spite of the pope this act of folly and injustice 
was accomplished, and the city of Constantinople 
saw its remaining provinces divided between 
Frenchmen and Venetians. This was in 1204, 
and was only the prelude to a series of disastrous 
expeditions, each one more fatal than the other, 
until at last in 1270, St. Louis, King of France, 
the leader of the eighth great Crusade, died of 
the plague at Tunis, whither Charles of Anjou 



THE RESULTS OF THE CBUSADES. 

had drawn him, against the king's own judg- 
ment, in order to collect some bad debts that 
were owing to French and Italian traders. 

As a matter of fact, the First Crusade, under 
the brave knight, Godfrey of Bouillon, did cap- 
ture Jerusalem in 1098. For a century the 
Holy City was Christian. It was lost at the 
end of the twelfth century, and though for a 
short w^hile again in Christian hands, from 1229 
to 1245, it then definitely passed away from the 
control of Christian Europe into the hands of 
the oppressive and cruel Turk. Its possession 
had fired the heart of Christian Europe for three 
generations. But this fated city was too great 
a political prize for Islam to lose. Gradually 
the Moslems healed their divisions. The Turk- 
ish sultans, men of great military genius, broke 
down the hundred little emirs, and lifted the 
Leather Apron of their mining Turanian ances- 
tors over one fortress after another from the 
confines of Persia to the waters of the Mediter- 
ranean. Here, along the coast of Syria, the 
Crusaders had built up several little States, organ- 
ized with all the ingenuity of feudal lawyers, in 
such a way that the superior lord should have 
all the pomp and titles of authority and the most 
inferior vassal be left to his own sweet will and 



370 THE RESULTS OF THE CRUSADES, 

temper. The innermost of these States/ Edessa, 
faced the Euphrates, and long bore the brunt of 
the Moslem Orient. It was the first to fall. 
Before the end of the thirteenth century they 
had all disappeared, and only the picturesque 
ruins of their fortified hilltops remain to show 
what were once the hopes of a great Christian 
State in the Orient. 

The popular enthusiasm for the Crusades was 
originally universal. Kings, even emperors of 
the West, led their armies in person and under- 
went great hardships. A German emperor, 
Frederick Barbarossa, was drowned on the way 
across Asia Minor. St. Louis of France, as we 
have seen, died of the plague at Tunis. Noble 
princesses and high-born ladies, too, accompanied 
these expeditions. But few of the great military 
chiefs stayed in the East. Most of the knights 
who remained were French, and it is to that 
period that goes back the use of the French lan- 
guage in the East, as well as the political prestige 
that France long enjoyed throughout the Med- 
iterranean world. 

In time experience taught those Crusaders who 
stayed in the Orient that the heavily armed 
knight of EurojDe, with his great battle-horse, his 
huge lance and heavy sword, was ill-fitted to 



THE BESULTS OF THE CBUSADES. 371 

carry on a guerrilla warfare for the Holy Land. 
Three military orders arose, with improved 
methods of warfare, that contributed much to 
the safety of pilgrims, the protection of Jerusa- 
lem, and of the fortified castles of Syria and 
Palestine. They were the Knights Hospitaller 
of St. John, the Knights of the Temple, and the 
Teutonic Knights. Originally established for 
the service of the sick, they became an organized 
feudal army of volunteers. Their castles arose 
all over the Holy Land, their bravery and adven- 
tures were in the mouth of every pilgrim. In 
them the romance and the poetry of the Crusades 
reached its height. All Europe looked on them 
as the true, the permanent Crusaders, and staked 
its hopes of recovery of the Holy Land on their 
skill and endurance. Thousands of estates were 
bestowed on them in the thirteenth century — 
their farms and castles stretched continuously 
from the Mediterranean to the Baltic and from 
the Atlantic to the Black Sea. It is in the vicis- 
situdes of their history that we ought to look for 
the true ideal of the Crusades, and the measure 
of its realization. 

The richest of them, the Templars, became 
the chief banking house of Europe. In the 
fierce struggle between the kings of France and 



372 THE RESULTS OF THE CBUSADES, 

the Pope of Rome, the Knights of the Temple 
went down most tragically — the justice of their 
condemnation is yet, and perhaps always will 
be, an open question. The Teutonic Knights, 
after the loss of the Holy Land, turned their 
faces homeward to Germany. The soil of 
Prussia, then the home of barbarian pagan peo- 
ples, and of Northeastern Germany, was turned 
over to them, as a missionary brotherhood of 
laymen, with the purpose of overthrowing 
paganism and of establishing Christianity, in- 
cidentally of creating new marches for the 
empire. Soon they were known as the Schwert- 
brueder, the Brothers of the Sword — a term 
that sufficiently well indicates the manner, if not 
the spirit, in which they propagated the gospel. 
Their splendid mediaeval fortress still stands 
along the Baltic, the great pile of Marienburg, 
whence Pomerania, Lithuania, Esthonia, and all 
the border-lands of Prussia and Russia received 
the Christian faith. 

The Hospitallers, or Knights of St. John, after 
their expulsion from the Holy Land, clung still 
to the control of the port of Smyrna, and their 
fidelity has even yet its reward, for Smyrna is 
now to France what Shanghai is to England. 
Eventually they were established on the island 



THE BESULTS OF THE CBUSADE8, 373 

of Khodes, where they remained until nearly 
four centuries ago (1520), when they were driven 
out by the Turk after one of the most desperate 
sieges of history. Their last foothold in the 
Mediterranean was on the island of Malta. In 
the latter half of the eighteenth century, they 
lost even this remnant of their old power, and 
with them the last glamour of the Crusades dis- 
appeared. There is yet an Order of the Knights 
of Malta, and the pope still appoints a Grand 
Commander — but it is a mere ceremony. The 
old religious military orders, with their three 
vows of celibacy, poverty, and obedience, have 
disappeared. Cardinal Lavigerie tried to estab- 
lish one for the suppression of the slave-trade in 
the heart of Africa, but with indifferent success. 
Such institutions only flourish on the soil of 
simple and childlike faith ; agnosticism and 
commercialism are too cold an atmosphere for 
them. 

In the Crusades took place the first great 
expansion of Europe. From the year 500 to the 
year 1100 — for six hundred years — the peoples 
who now make up the great States of France, 
Germany, England, and Spain, were growing 
from infancy to mature youth, in a civic sense. 
All the rawness, weakness, waywardness, all the 



374 THE RESULTS OF THE CRUSADES. 

folly and strong violent passion of youthj are 
upon them. They are in the hands of a gentle 
but firm nurse, the Catholic Church ; but every 
now and then they break away from school, and 
there is pandemonium. The sea breaks out in the 
heart of the Anglo-Saxon, and the marsh in the 
heart of the Frank, the dark deep forest calls 
out in the soul of the German, and the North- 
man is again upon his piratical galley. The 
early Middle Ages are apparently a perfect 
welter of disorder and anarchy. But somehow 
in the eleventh century there is a beginning of 
better things. A king of France arises out of 
the wreckage of the French successors of Charle- 
magne's children. An emperor grows strong, 
not only in name, but in fact, among the Ger- 
mans. He is in theory the Roman emperor in 
the West, and though outside of Germany his 
real power is small, this very theory of a one 
individual empire of Rome that had never been 
destroyed, but only held in abeyance as a trust 
by the Bishop of Rome, gave once more a sacred, 
venerable character to the supreme civil author- 
ity. Then, too, the Roman law was there as 
a significant commentary on what might be 
made out of the imperial name. The Church 
had saved it, assimilated it, christianized it, and 



THE RESULTS OF THE CRUSADES. 375 

in time the emperors would use it as a leverage 
for far-reaching ambitions. 

The old Gallo-Roman civilization had never ut- 
terly died out in France — the ancient Gaul ; and 
now the traditions of Old Rome in government and 
administration were handed down to the Western 
emperor by the clergy of Old Rome herself. In 
classics, in legal procedure, in the continuous use 
of Latin as the tongue of religion, diplomacy, in 
the traditions of architecture, in the use of the 
Latin scholarship, the Roman Church had kept 
alive no little of the sober and practical Latin 
spirit — enough at least to act as a leaven for the 
new society that was to issue from the laboring 
womb of Europe. Thus, the modern world of 
Europe and America has become the daughter of 
the civilization of Rome and Greece, and not the 
theatre of Moslem propaganda. 

It is true that the actual territory conquered 
from the Turks and held by the Christians of 
Europe was never very great — the city of Jeru- 
salem, some strongholds in Palestine, some ports 
in Syria. Dn the compact masses of Islam in 
Persia, Egypt, and Northern Africa they made 
little or no impression. In the Mediterranean 
the islands of Cyprus and Crete passed gradu- 
ally into the possession of Venice. A corner of 



,*^ 



376 THE BE8ULTS OF THE CBUSADES. 

ancient Armenia remained some centuries semi- 
independent of Greek and Turk^ under feudal 
influences of France. French families held on to 
feudal office and rights in Greece and the Archi- 
pelago. These were about all the positive gains, 
and they have long since melted away. But the 
political results of the Crusades were very im- 
portant in a negative and prohibitive way. Inter- 
nally, the European States of Germany, France, 
England, and Spain were very weak at the begin- 
ning of the Crusades. Feudalism had reached 
the point of utter disintegration. The royal 
authority, the concept of the State, all centraliz- 
ing influences, were everywhere at their lowest 
ebb.. Social anarchy was lifting threateningly its 
spectre-like head. Shattering conflicts between 
the Church and immoral arbitrary rulers were 
multiplying. Schisms in the Church, revolts and 
rebellions in the civil order, were growing. The 
warlike Turks, to whom had fallen the real power 
and wealth of the Caliphs at Bagdad and Cairo, 
were on the eve of capturing Constantinople. 
In great flotillas the equally warlike barbarians 
of the new States in Eussia were coming down 
yearly by the Don and the Dnieper, and crossing 
the Black Sea with the same intention. The 
Arab kingdoms in Spain were at the height 



THE RESULTS OF THE CRUSADES. 377 

of their development. Had the Moslem Orient 
been left unmolested, free to carry on the Holy 
War according to the law of Mohammed, it wonld 
have fomid everywhere in Europe the Christians 
divided, ignorant of the great principles of the 
art of war, children in navigation, nnable to carry 
on or resist sieges, half-barbarian and helpless in 
their diplomacy, the veriest lot of political infants 
one could imagine. From the summits of the Pyre- 
nees, from the coasts of Sicily and Syria and Asia 
Minor, from the endless steppes of Russia, from the 
deepest Orient, would have come down again on 
the rich and tempting lands of Southern Europe 
hordes far w^orse than five or six centuries before 
had destroyed the Roman State. There is an 
organic law of preservation for States and civili- 
zations that works like an instinct, and for Europe, 
since the days of Alaric and Attila, that instinct 
was incarnate in the bishops of Rome. In spite 
of its unspeakable misfortunes, the Eternal City 
still held on to some of the large political tradi- 
tions of antiquity. The very soil and the monu- 
ments kept them alive, as did. the old laws of 
Rome and her spiritual ?vUthority that was recog- 
nized from the Mediterranean to the BpJtic. 

In was well for the world that at this time 
the West hurled itself upon the East and 



378 THE RESULTS OF THE CRUSADES, 

thereby arrested the political consolidation* and 
growth of the latter. It did so at a propitious 
moment, when Islam was passing from the con- 
trol of Arabs to that of Turks, and everywhere 
existed a feudal disorder not unlike that of the 
West. It accomplished the impossible in find- 
ing a splendid and inspiring symbol, the cross of 
Christ, for a dozen discordant nationalities. It 
seized on a psychological moment to weld into a 
common, conscious organic unity of Catholicism, 
all the nations of Europe that had hitherto been 
in communion, indeed, with Rome, but had not 
yet come into daily and vivifying contact with 
one another. In these long wars the Moslem 
was made to fight for his existence; he was 
pushed finally out of the magnificent island of 
Sicily ; he was driven from his perches in the 
Maritime Alps; he was hunted from his scat- 
tered, but ancient, strongholds in Southern Italy 
and Southern France, whence he had for cen- 
turies been contemplating their conquest. A 
thousand Christian galleys on the Mediterranean . 
and the Adriatic drove the corsairs of Africa to 
their distant lairs, and relieved the Christian 
people of the seaboard from the daily fear of 
slavery, their women from outrage, their chil- 
dren from ransom. This nameless horror of 



THE BESULTS OF THE CBUSABES. 379 

Moslem piracy, that has not yet finally disap- 
peared, had paralyzed the Italian and French 
merchant, had suspended the natural free move- 
ment of peoples across the Mediterranean, was 
debasing the political sense of all the Christians 
of Southern Europe. In Visigothic Spain, the 
descendants of the Cid Campeador took heart 
once more. The good knight Roland had again 
arisen, and from his last rock of defence had 
blown a strong blast that reechoed over Europe. 
The Christian States of the Balkans (for if there 
is a Balkan question, it is owing to the failure 
of the Crusades), though ignorant and blind as 
to their welfare, got a long respite through the 
Crusades. Indeed, they put ofl entirely, if not 
political humiliation, at least any such complete 
assimilation into Islam as has fallen upon the 
Coptic race in Egypt. It is owing to the Cru- 
sades that the profound eternal antithesis and 
antipathy of the political ideals of East and 
West were brought out, precisely when the final 
adjustment of territorial limits was taking place. 
The great wars of 'Spain in the fifteenth century, 
that ended in the fall of G-renada, the great wars 
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries be- 
tween Hungary and Austria on the one side and 
the sultans of Constantinople on the other, are 



380 THE BESULTS OF THE CBlTSADES. 

really Crusades. Thus, at the very threshold of 
modern times these wars were the last death- 
struggle between Islam and Christianity over 
two great natural bulwarks of Europe, the 
Pyrenees and the Danube. There is the most 
intimate relationship of cause and effect between 
thfe siege of Jerusalem and its capture, that 
ended the first Crusade, and the siege of Vienna, 
that six hundred years later immortalized John 
Sobieski and broke triumphantly the last effort 
of Islam to extend its propaganda over Europe. 
What will you have, Christians ! the immoral 
reign of fatalism with the hopeless human degra- 
dation of the Orient, or the uplifting reign of 
freedom ' with the general human progress and 
exaltation of the Occident ? Our fathers before 
us, walking in a dimmer light, chose decisively 
and made the history that I have been outlining. 
If the citizens of the Pacific coast gaze out 'to- 
day, as the masters of the future over an illimit- 
able Orient ; if the evil genius that some grave 
historians consider the real Antichrist, enthroned 
by the Golden Horn, is now threatened from the 
depths of the Orient itself ; if the latest phase of 
this eternal warfare between the ideals of the 
oldest strata of humanity and those of the 
youngest opens with universal victory written 



TEE RESULTS OF THE CBUSADES, 381 

on our banners, we may know that the temper, 
the spirit, the weapons, the persistency, that 
have uplifted us, were not created in a day, any 
more than the conditions of the Orient are the 
result of yesterday.^ 

Never did the great French Catholic states- 
man, Montalembert, utter a truer word than 
when, fifty years ago, he cried out in the French 
Chamber of Deputies, " We are the sons of the 
Crusaders." Freeman has said that all history 
is only the politics of the past, the sure and real 
interests of mankind which have gotten crystal- 
lized by the shaping activity of the present that 
strikes, stamps, and returns no more. History 
is not always mere writing or telling — very 
often it is the real conditions, the institutions, 
the social framework and circumstance of our 
lives, the actual dwelling that our ancestors have 
made for us. The Crusades were the great po- 
litical school of the people of Europe, as they 
passed from their crude ebullient youth to the 
maturity of man's estate.^ It is not without 



1 The Crusades are not, in my mind, either the popular de- 
lusions that our cheap literature has determined them to be, nor 
papal conspiracies against kings and peoples, as they appear to 
Protestant controversialists ; nor the savage outbreak of expiring 
barbarism, thirsting for blood and plunder, nor volcanic explo- 
sions of religious tolerance. I believe them to have been in their 



382 THE RESULTS OF THE CRUSADES. 

design that Shakespeare; dealing in ^^ Richard the 
Second'' with the most profound problems of 



deep sources, and in the minds of their best champions, and in 
the main tendency of their results, capable of ample justification. 
They were the first great effort of mediseval life to go beyond the 
pursuit of selfish and isolated ambitions ; they were the trial-feat 
of the young world, essaying to use, to the glory of God and the 
benefit of man, the arms of its new knighthood. That they failed 
in their direct object is only what may be alleged against almost 
every great design which the great disposer of events has moulded 
to help the world's progress ; for the world has grown wise from 
the experience of failure, rather than by the winning of high aims. 
That the good they did was largely leavened with evil may be said 
of every war that has ever been waged ; that bad men rose by them 
while good men fell, is and must be true, wherever and whenever 
the race is to the swift and the battle to the strong. But that in 
the end they were a benefit to the world no one who reads can 
doubt ; and that in their course they brought out a love for all that 
is heroic in human nature, the love of freedom, the honor of prow- 
ess, sympathy with sorrow, perseverance to the last, the chronicles 
of the age abundantly prove ; proving, moreover, that it was by 
the experience of these times that the forms of those virtues were 
realized and presented to posterity. — Bishop Stubbs, "Seven- 
teen Lectures on Mediaeval and Modern History," p. 180. 

It used to be the fashion to regard the Crusades as mere fan- 
tastic exhibitions of a temporary turbulent religious fanaticism, 
aiming at ends wholly visionary, and missing them, wasting the 
best life of Europe in colossal and bloody undertakings, and leav- 
ing effects only of evil for the time which came after. More rea- 
sonable views now prevail; and while the impulse in which the 
vast movement took its rise is recognized as passionate and semi- 
barbaric, it is seen that many effects followed which were beneficent 
rather than harmful, which could not perhaps have been at the 
time in other ways realized. As I have already suggested, proper- 
ties were to an important extent redistributed in Europe, and the 
constitution of States was favorably effected. Lands were sold at 
low prices by those who were going on the distant expeditions, 
very probably, as they knew, never to return; and horses and 



THE BESULTS OF THE CBUSADES. 383 

the English Constitution, sets down among the 
public merits of a great English noble his devo- 
tion to the pohtical ideals of Christendom: — 

" Many a time hath banish'd Norfolk fought 
For Jesu Christ in glorious Christian field 
Streaming the ensign of the Christian Cross 
Against black pagans, Turks, and Saracens." 

The Crusades developed in a humane sense the 
art of war. Captives were habitually ransomed 
for money that was gravely needed by both 
sides as real sinews of war; thus the whole- 
armor, with all martial equipments, were bought at high prices 
by the Jews, who could .not hold land, and the history of whom 
throughout the Middle Ages is commonly traced in fearful lines of 
blood and fire, but who increased immeasurably their movable wealth 
through these transfers of property. Communes bought liberties 
by large contributions to the needs of their lord ; and their liberties, 
once secured, were naturally confirmed and augmented, as the 
years went on. The smaller tended to be absorbed in the larger ; 
the larger often to come more strictly under royal control, thus in- 
creasing the power of the sovereign — which meant at the time, 
general laws, instead of local, a less minutely oppressive adminis- 
tration, the furtherance of the movement toward national unity. 
It is a noticeable fact that Italy took but a small part, compara- 
tively, in the Crusades ; and the long postponement of organic union 
between different parts of the magnificent peninsula is not with- 
out relation to this. The infiuence which operated elsewhere in 
Europe to efface distinctions of custom and language in separate 
communities, to override and extinguish local animosities, to make 
scattered peoples conscious of kinship, did not operate there ; and 
the persistent severance of sections from each other, favored of 
course by the run of the rivers and the vast separating walls of the 
Apenines, was the natural consequence of the want of this power- 
ful unifying force. — Storrs, "Bernard of Ciairvaux," New York 
(Scribner's), 1897, pp. 644-45. 



384 THE BESULTS OF THE CBUSADES. 

sale slaughter of more barbarous times was 
avoided. The men of the West learned the light 
Parthian tactics of the Orient, also the daily 
exercises with bow and lance and sword, the 
details of commissariat and transportation, the 
cost and difficulties and consequences of a great 
war. Their weapons grew lighter, and their 
armor and horses more manageable. The eccle- 
siastical military orders, and the many European 
ladies of rank who followed their lords to the 
sepulchre of Christ, introduced milder manners, 
and a humanity unknown to the earlier times. 
The sorrows and defeats of the Crusaders, their 
humiliations and losses, were very often borne 
in a spirit of Christian faith, as a rebuke from 
God for their own wrong-doings and evil lives. 
The natural virtues of Islam, the courtesy and 
chivalry of its warriors, were not without their 
effect on the Christian knight. The legends of 
the Crusades are filled with figures of Moslems 
renowned for bravery and hospitality, gentleness 
and courtesy. A Richard Lion-Heart finds a 
Saladin his peer in many things. 

The art of navigation profited very much by 
the Crusades — the vessels were made larger for 
the growing multitudes of pilgrims and warriors, 
for the transportation of horses and provisions. 



TBE BESULT8 OF THE CRUSADES, 385 

The masts and the sails were enlarged and were 
multiplied. The art of sailing by the wind was 
learned. Every such progress was a step toward 
the discovery of the new world. The skill of a 
Christopher Columbus was an inherited thing, 
acquired through the experience of several long 
generations of his ancestors in the service of 
Genoa. 

We owe to the Crusades the use of the drum, 
the trumpet, the light and slender lance. The 
science of heraldry dates from the period of the 
Crusades, and though it may not contribute 
much to the comfort of humanity, it plays a 
prominent role in the development of the fine 
arts and of the social life of Europe in the last 
few centuries. Many fruit trees now common 
in the West were then introduced into Europe 
from Asia Minor, or the lowlands of Meso- 
potamia, their natural home. The apricot, the 
pear, the peach, the plum, trees and shrubs and 
flowers of uncommon beauty and elegance, made 
their way in this manner into the States of 
Europe. Some curious things found a new home 
for themselves ; thus, the windmills that are so 
common in Holland and Brandenburg were im- 
ported from the Orient. Until the Crusades 
men of standing were usually shaven — since 



386 THE BESULTS OF THE CRUSADES, 

then the observance of this civilized relic of 
ancient society has been abandoned to the clergy. 
Healing recipes and plants of the Orient became 
the common property of the West. Medical 
theory and practice gained much by the study of 
Arabic writings that bore along the learning and 
experience of Greece. The hospital service at 
Jerusalem and elsewhere opened a new era in 
the history of Christian charity. 

The cause of human freedom was greatly 
benefited by the Crusades. Knight and peasant 
fought side by side for many years, rendered 
mutual service, shared the same hardships, and 
learned to esteem one another. Thus the theory 
of Christian equality was daily reduced to reality. 
Then again, the knight needed ready money for 
his equipment, to pay off his creditors before 
departing, to provide for his family. He got it 
from his vassals, but before they paid it over, he 
was bound to secure them certain rights and 
privileges in solemn forms of writmg. So arose 
on every estate of France and Germany free 
towns and cities, legally recognized by their 
former lords as independent and self-governing. 
Local and private feuds ceased to a great extent 
during the Crusades; there was a certain halo 
about the homes of those who were supposed 



THE BESULTS OF THE CBUSADES. 387 

to be bent on freeing the common home of 
all Christians. The national unities of France, 
England, and Germany had then a chance to 
grow, unmolested by the earlier anarchy of 
primitive feudalism. The numerous serfs on the 
knights' estates became free peasants in time by 
service in the wars or by purchase ; at the other 
end of the State the king entered at last upon 
the authority necessary to preserve order and 
develop the common weal. 

The mystery of the Orient, the long absences 
of the knights and their squires, the new strange 
romance of their lives, without parallel in the 
experience of the West, the curiosities of art and 
commerce that soon multiplied, gave a great im- 
petus to the literatures of Europe — notably to 
poetry and song. The courtly troubadours and 
the gay minnesinger are the creatures of the 
Crusades. The tournaments, the courts of love, 
the moderation and refining of personal man- 
ners, popular habits, and institutions, all date 
from these great wars that furnished an infinity of 
data to the busy brain and the wagging tongue 
of many a strolling poet or musician from 
Otranto to Drontheim. 

Italy took little part, as a militant element, in 
the Crusades, partly because of its thorough dis- 



388 THE RESULTS OF THE CRUSADES. 

union — partly because of its superior culture. 
The Italians soon saw that there was greater 
profit for them in the transportation of their 
Christian brethren, the care of the commissariat, 
and the establishment of commerce. After all, 
these were necessary things, and the great cities 
of Venice and Genoa were admirably located for 
the work, as was also their rival Pisa. They 
enabled the Crusaders to cross the ocean quickly 
and successfully ; they brought with them men 
skilled in the art of sieges ; they were the secre- 
taries and couriers of the French and German 
knights — supple, cautious, wiry, alert, very 
Christian indeed, but with a sharp eye for the 
goods of this world. They took out their pay in 
commercial privileges and are the genuine fore- 
runners of all modern commerce. Along#the 
coast of Syria and of Asia Minor, from Sm3n?na 
to Beirut, there was in every port an Italian 
quarter. In the roadstead lay their galleys, 
high, broad, elegant for that day. In their 
special reservation were always a church, a bath, 
a bakery, wharves, stores, a market-place, a bank 
and office of exchange. The Italian tongue was 
the tongue of Oriental commerce. Bookkeeping 
and the use of Arabic numerals, the system of 
drafts and bills of exchange, letters of credit and 



THE BESULTS OF THE CBUSABES. 389 

the like, sprang up on these foreign shores — the 
departing Templar or Hospitaller sold out his 
estate in Syria and received his money, his gold 
bezants or angels, over the counters of corre- 
spondents in Paris, London, or Eome. The flag 
of Venice or Genoa or Pisa floated always over 
these little strongholds of commerce, that were 
long an abomination to the "malignant and 
turbaned Tm-k." From the remoter Orient came 
through the hands of the Italian merchant the 
silks of China, the spices of Borneo, the fruits of 
Asia Minor, the ivory and pearls of India. His 
correspondents were at Naples and Milan and 
Florence, at Marseilles and Bordeaux, at London 
and Paris, at Kieff and Novgorod. Oranges and 
figs, sugar and wine and oil, brocades and mus- 
lins, fine tapestries and costly rugs, colored glass 
of Tyre and steel blades of Damascus — a thou- 
sand, articles of use and ornament could be met 
with upon his manifests. And so the city life 
of Europe took on a charm, an elegance, a 
variety that it had never known before. The 
middle classes date from those days — the opu- 
lent tradesman and the cultured merchant, the 
skilled laborer and the substantial banker. The 
turbulent republics of Italy, the first great temple 
of democracy since the overthrow of Athens and 



390 THE BESULTS OF THE CRUSADES. 

Sparta, arose on this trade, and by their wealth 
defied emperor and baron, by the same permitted 
themselves the expensive luxury of yearly con- 
stitutions, wholesale proscriptions, political ex- 
periments without number. The common man 
had now a hundred avenues of opportunity open 
to him, of escape from a hemming and stifling 
feudalism, of elevation into a higher and more 
independent sphere of energy. The monotonous 
life of the remote castle took on color and variety. 
Everywhere the vivifying current of commerce 
cut a channel for itself. European mankind had 
burst the bonds of its swaddling clothes, saw 
and measured with eagerness the great world, 
and recognized the fulness and glory of its new 
opportunities. 

The first progress of mediaeval medicine and 
constitutional law is closely related to these 
great movements of mankind to the East. Out 
of them came the first conscious lay attempts at 
a civil government based on written law — the 
feudal States of Syria. Almost the first written 
codes of mediaeval law are the Assizes of Jerusa- 
lem, a formally excogitated and guaranteed leg- 
islation for all classes. Commercial law, that 
had made little progress since the code of Amalfi, 
was reduced to writing and to a system. Mari- 



THE RESULTS OF THE CRUSADES. 391 

time and military law, the old imperial traditions 
and the valuable experience of Constantinople, 
asserted themselves — in a word, the Crusades 
were the first great school of general and common 
civilized life for all the nations of Europe. 

Not only did they increase the knowledge of 
the world and widen the horizon of learning — 
they brought out very high qualities of moral 
life. Personality asserted itself very strongly, 
given the weakness of authority and the count- 
less new perils of these undertakings. If monk 
and priest were zealous and eloquent, the baron 
and his men were heroic and enduring. A new 
public consciousness was aroused, and there 
dawned on the humblest mind the possibility of 
what a united Christendom could do. Nations 
were drawn together closely in this lively en- 
terprise. The wealth and elegance of Moslem 
society impressed the Crusaders, as also did the 
polish and culture of Constantinople and its 
Greek society. One was infidel and the other 
schismatic, yet daily contact with both begot 
more liberal and tolerant relations. The ele- 
ments of common humanity asserted themselves 
in diplomacy and hospitality, in ransom and truce 
and single combat ; the courteous and enlightened 
toleration of modern society is all in germ in the 



392 THE RESULTS OF THE CBUSADES, 

mediaeval Crusades. Men hate one another, 
says Silvio Pellico, only because they do not 
know one another. 

In these two centuries, therefore, the world 
of Europe expanded mightily and organically. 
The once barbarian Germanic peoples, educated 
in their infancy by the Catholic Church, broke 
the bonds of serflike dependency, cast aside their 
primitive narrow feudalism, and could in time 
become the great States of Europe. They went 
forth, sword in hand, across land and sea, in 
pursuit of a high spiritual ideal, and while they 
did not realize it, nevertheless it drew them like 
a star to great heights of personal endeavor and 
social achievement. Fine qualities of mind and 
heart were developed in these enterprises that 
partook at once of the conquests of an Alexan- 
der and the results of colonization. The cycle 
of social life was immeasurably enlarged. Po- 
liteness established its reign with the elevation 
of woman, that came through the Church and 
the institutions of chivalry. The arts and 
sciences of the Greek Orient and the Moslem 
world were made known to Europe. Literature 
found new models, new ideals and aspirations ; 
the singers of the people new notes, new themes, 
new passions. Industry and commerce were 



THE BESULTS OF THE CRUSADES. 393 

admitted as factors in the new States of Europe 
and the Orient. All the factors that were to 
bring about the creation of modern society, with 
the exception of the latest inventions, were then 
planted on the soil of Europe. Unity, assimila- 
tion, progress, go back to these great displace- 
ments of European humanity. No doubt there 
w^as much injustice, much crime and human 
folly — but wars have their civilizing and hu- 
manizing functions as well as peace. They are 
often unavoidable and they have their allotted 
place in the divine plan that surely governs the 
world of men and things. Though we may 
never again see a united Christendom, it will 
always be a consolation to every adorer of Jesus 
Christ that for one brief hour in the history of 
Western humanity His cross dominated all 
social life, drew to it every class of men, shone 
resplendent and humanizing in the zenith of 
public life, affected all legislation and human 
development, impressed its spiritual meaning on 
millions of hearts, and seemed like the holy 
aurora of the long-sighed-for millennium. 



ON THE ITALIAN EENAISSANCE. 

By the word " Renaissance " is usually meant 
that period of mediaeval history in which the 
ideas, tastes, artistic principles, and the political 
spirit of Graeco-Roman or pagan antiquity for 
the first time asserted themselves in Christian 
society, and finally, to a grea'^er or lesser extent, 
prevailed and affected the development of all 
Christian peoples. The time, roughly speaking, 
is the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries — though 
the glorious and typical period really comes to 
an end with the death of Pope Leo the Tenth 
and the careers of Raphael and Michael Angelo. 
In something less than one hundred years there 
occurred, chiefly in Italy, a vigorous advance in 
all that pertained to classical learning and the 
fine arts. First the Latin and then the Greek 
authors of antiquity were either discovered for 
the first time, or studied and appreciated from a 
new point of view. The best manuscript copies 
of them were sought out with avidity. Popes 
and kings, bishops and rich individuals, kept 
great scholars travelling in all directions for 

394 



ON THE ITALIAN BENAISSANCE. 395 

such literary treasures. An unknown work of 
Cicero, or a fragment of Tacitus, was hailed 
with scarcely less enthusiasm than the discovery 
of America. The conflict of the great popes of 
Rome and the emperors of Germany, the political 
failure of the Crusades, the increase of the city 
populations and the growth of new cities, the 
perfection of social intercourse, the rise of great 
banking houses, the increased value of arable 
lands, the growing trade of Venice and Genoa 
and Florence with the Orient — the only im- 
mediate result of the Crusades — were so many 
remote causes of this revival, which is less a 
sudden outgrowth than a natural development 
of the Middle Ages. 

Then, the popes had come back to Rome at 
the opening of this period. The unhappy schisms 
that were rending Europe before the rival claims 
of three or four bishops- to the See of Rome had 
been finally settled at the Council of Constance 
(1418) to the content of Christendom, and that 
pontifical unity restored which has now lasted 
for five hundred years. Rome was again a 
centre of government, and the papacy again a 
Roman institution. It was no longer in the 
hands of one nation, France, nor domhiated by 
the interests of that one people. Italy itself had 



396 ON THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE, 

gradually emerged from the political anarchy of 
the fourteenth century into a certain unity. Five 
great States were solidly established on the Italian 
peninsula and held a balance of power that was 
not disturbed with success until the end of the 
fifteenth century, when the municipal revolu- 
tions of Florence opened to France, Spain, and 
Austria the road of successive domination over 
the peoples of Italy. To these ^yq^ States — 
Naples, Florence, Milan, Venice, and Rome — 
were subject a multitude of smaller cities and 
principahties, in greater or lesser degree, with 
more or less acquiescence. Some of these States 
were quite feudal and aristocratic, others quite 
popular and democratic. Still, the land was 
administered with a certain regularity of sys- 
tem. The prosperity of Italy was perhaps never 
greater ; there were wars and sieges and revo- 
lutions — but they were seldom bloody. The 
Italians are henceforth merchants and farmers. 
The wars are carried on by wandering bands of 
hired ruffians from Germany and England and 
France — the famous Condottieri, whose aim is 
always to save their own carcasses and extort 
the last penny from their employers. Nearly 
everywhere the old popular liberties have lost 
their meaning, the popular constitutions have 



ON THE ITALIAN -RENAISSANCE. 397 

"ceased to operate, and the political power is held 
by some bold and resourceful man. Liberty had 
mostly been begotten in turbulence and disorder 
— when the period of parturition was over the 
masses sank exhausted to the level of mere 
enjoyment. In the Italian city-states hence- 
forth it is the age of the " tyrants/' the " des- 
pots/' very much like certain periods of old 
Greek history, when the richest merchant in the 
State seized on the reins of authority, slew or 
exiled or imprisoned the heads of factions, im- 
posed his will on the people, gave them peace 
and comfort, and put the revenues in his own 
treasury. Italy was dominated by these men — 
the Medici at Florence, the Farnesi at Naples, 
the Visconti and Sforza at Milan, the Baglioni 
at Perugia, the Malatesta at Rimini, and a host 
of smaller but no less masterful men, no less 
quick, watchful, and- resolute. They were nearly 
all new men, either scions of the smaller nobility. 
or daring spirits from the lower strata of Italian 
life. None of them inherited his power. Each 
one got it by some deed of violence or cunning, 
some great personal act of intelligent political 
boldness or "virtii" that command universal 
attention and admiration. Of course, he held 
his standing, his "stato," by the same policy. 



398 ON THE ITALIAN BENAISSANGE, 

To such men the classical revival, particularly 
the Latin, became an instrument of government. 
The native Latin scholars got employment and 
salaries and distinction from them. It came 
about that an Italian man could advance more 
quickly with a Latin speech of Ciceronian ele- 
gance, or a mouthful of sharp and pungent 
epigrams., than with a big war-horse and a coat 
of mail. Moreover, all this was in the his- 
tory and manners of the people of Italy, whose 
soil had been for centuries the "dancing-field 
of Mars," the "dark and bloody ground'' of 
Europe. The centres of government were no 
longer the lonely castles or cloud-kissing burgs 
of the Apennines or the Abruzzi. The hard 
and unlovely feudal rule of Colonna and Orsini, 
of Frangipani and Conti, was over with the 
Gregorys and the Innocents, the Henrys and 
the Fredericks. Italy was now governed as of 
old, from her cultured cities. She still knew 
only a government by imperium, but it was now 
to be exercised with the moderation born of 
humanitas. The stern mediaeval fortress was 
abandoned with its moat and its drawbridge, 
and the house of the despot, the very ^pot where 
he had risen to greatness, was enlarged, beauti- 
fied, and made the seat of government. Enough 



ON THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE. 399 

big Germans and Englishmen, adventurers and 
semi-outlaws of all Europe, were kept on hand 
to overawe the unruly elements of the popula- 
tion, to form a bodyguard for the despot, but 
the palace was given over practically to the 
enjoyment of life — to the recitation of poems 
and tales of chivalry, to musical and theatrical 
entertainments, to every kind of amusement 
that could beguile the uncertain leisure of the 
master and his numerous household, or distract 
the wealthy and the influential from meditation 
on the gilded slavery into which they had fallen. 
The despot's position was by no means secure 
from revenge, envy, or popular whim. Now 
and then velleities, vague souvenirs of liberty, 
awoke faintly in the heart of some exalted 
youth, or romantically transfigured reminis- 
cences of popular freedom stirred up some 
belated Eienzi. But the Italian peoples were 
now prosperous in peace, and all such fruitless 
efforts stand out as proofs of the general con- 
tentment with the political situation. The re- 
publican spirit was dead, and the peninsula was 
moving through despotism and oligarchy to its 
final monarchical constitution. 

The last century was the great epoch of in- 
ventions. They crowd one another so fast; we 



400 ON THE ITALIAN BENAISSANCE. 

are so near them, so in the midst of the far- 
reaching social changes they are imposing on us, 
that we cannot yet appreciate with finahty their 
importance. So it was in the fifteenth century 
with practical politics. Events of the greatest 
interest for the world followed with startling 
rapidity on one another — the healing of the 
great Schism of the "West (1418), the Fall of 
Constantinople (1453), the growth of Venice as 
queen of the seas, the natural ambition of regen- 
erated France to pose as political mistress of 
Europe, the simultaneous creation of a splendid 
Spanish monarchy that dominated Germany, 
Austria, Italy, and the Netherlands, and under- 
took to dispute those claims of France on a 
hundred bloody fields. On all sides human in- 
terest, curiosity, energy, were aroused. Infinite 
opportunities arose, even before the discovery of 
America. Man came almost at once to know 
himself as the source of the greatest things, to 
look on himself as capable of infinite progress 
in any direction. After the long mediaeval era 
of collectivism an era of individualism had set 
in, and the Italian man was the best equipped 
for the new order of things. His experience, 
bought in blood and tears, in a multitudinous 
wrestling of several centuries, was his title to 



ON THE ITALIAN BENAISSANCE. 401 

preeminency. A long series of historical events 
was behind him, during which all the great 
factors of European life had arisen, developed 
and conflicted with one another. It was an 
hour, if ever, for the philosopher of history, and 
he was at hand. It was in this Italian political 
world, at once old and new — old with the relig- 
ious heart and experience, the faith and the 
family life of the Middle Ages ; new with all the 
prophetic stirrings and impulses of the future — 
that Latin and Greek learning, the poets, philos- 
ophers and historians of pagan antiquity, found 
the nation of disciples best fitted-for them. The 
Italian tongue is the Latin tongue of the com- 
mon people, peasantry, and soldiers of Old Rome, 
only modified by contact with the Teutonic dia- 
lects and filled with a new Christian content and 
spirit through contact with Catholicism. So 
the Latin classics, as they came back into daily 
life with Petrarch and Boccaccio and their name- 
less contemporaries, with Yalla and Poggio and 
so many others, awoke from their secular sleep, 
as it were in their own family circle. Their 
spirit and their ideals of life and man, their 
vague or negative teaching about the soul and 
the future, their amorphous notions of G-od, 
righteousness, sin and evil, their cold cynicism 



402 ON THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE, 

and ruinous agnosticism, their ineffable obscenity 
and their cringing adulation of force and suc- 
cess, their hopeless moral debasement and their 
refined intellect ualism — all these things came 
back with them and appealed to the rising gener- 
ation of Italians with a siren voice. Literature 
was always their national weakness, and the 
sources and agencies of it — schools, books, 
writing — were always better preserved in Italy 
than elsewhere. The monuments of Roman 
grandeur were there; her cities never forgot 
that they were the homes of the great poets ; 
Mantua boasted of Vergil's birth, and Naples of 
possessing his tomb ; Padua was proud of her 
historian Livy, and Tibur of her satirist Horace. 
It was the first thing that the children in the 
schools learned and the last thing that the aged 
citizens forgot. All through the fifteenth cen- 
tury went on a constant excavation of the soil 
on the sites of these ancient cities, with the 
result that thousands of marble statues were 
found, the best work of a multitude of those 
Greek sculptors of the early empire who repeated 
for their imperial masters, at Rhodes or else- 
where on the coast of Asia Minor, the mas- 
terpieces of the glorious art of their Hellenic 
fatherland. The Law of Rome, that perfect 



ON THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE, 403 

mirror of the genius of the Eternal City, had for 
four hundred years been the constant study of 
Italians, both laymen and clerics, and thereby 
they had risen to eminence, not only at home, but 
in every land of Europe. Its spirit of absolutism, 
its enticing suggestions and examples of admin- 
istrative centralization, its large and luminous 
principles, its appeals to human reason and the 
common experience of mankind, its temper of 
finahty and practical infallibility, made it the 
great working code of the fifteenth and six- 
teenth centuries — likewise the sepulchre of 
mediaeval liberties and independence. 

This universal interest of Italians as commen- 
tators and expounders of an old national system 
of law and order, naturally developed much intel- 
lectual liberty. A lawyer is notoriously useless 
if he cannot see at least one other side to every 
question that can arise. And there were many 
of them in contemporary Italy who had been 
long accustomed, like Hudibras, to 

■ " Distinguish and divide 

A hair 'twixt south and southwest side." 

Then, too, the layman had never been so 
ignorant in Italy as in Germany and England. 
Not only was the career of the law always open 
to him, but also that of schoolmaster, of notary. 



404 ON THE ITALIAN EENAISSANCE, 

of tutor — and the noble and rich youth of Italy 
was always brought up by tutors. Yettorino da 
Feltre and Guarino da Yerona were only excel- 
lent in a multitude of lay teachers of the quat- 
trocento. The man of Italy was architect, artist, 
jurist, traveller, merchant — in a word, just- as 
the bishops of Italy dominate less in the politi- 
cal life of the nation than those of Germany 
or England, so there was in every city and 
town a clear-headed and self-conscious percentage 
of laymen, highly educated for the time, and 
persuaded that they were the representatives of 
the majesty of ancient Rome. Their hearts and 
minds were of course like wax for the new move- 
ment toward a revival of the times in which 
their forefathers had governed all civilized hu- 
manity. 

These elements alone would have sufficed to 
create a renaissance of learning on the soil of 
Italy. And, indeed, it was far advanced when 
Greek scholarship came to its aid, and gave it 
a powerful impulse and a logical basis. As a 
matter of fact the poetrj^, philosophy, and art of 
Rome were originally borrowed from the Greeks. 
The Roman, left to himself, was a shrewd farmer, 
a patient, obedient soldier, a painstaking lawyer. 
Further afield in the world of the mind the Catos 



ON THE ITALIAN BENAISSANCE. 405 

and Scipios never went — in fact^ they scented 
a grave danger in the absohite intellectuahsm 
of Greece as soon as it rose above their social 
horizon. But the fine mind of Greece was too 
beautiful — and beauty has always an hour of 
victory — to be kept out of the Roman city. 
And so from Ennius to Yergil it was the school- 
mistress of the heavy rustic Latin, a tongue of 
fields and cows, of beans and peas and fodder, 
of rough policemen and dickering pedlers. The 
Roman knew that his soul had no wings, but he 
bore the veiled sarcasm of his Athenian or Co- 
rinthian teacher for love of the graceful forms 
into which he was soon able to cast his thoughts, 
the very ones that he had borrowed from the 
gifted children of Hellas. He had destroyed 
their archaic autonomy, he had laid waste their 
small but marvellous State — this was their 
revenge, that in the hour of gross material 
triumph the spirit of • Rome prostrated itself 
before the spirit of Greece and divided with the 
latter the hegemony of mankind. 

And so, in the latter half of the fifteenth 
century, when that splendid seat of Greek life 
and thought, Constantinople, was unhappily lost 
to Christendom, there was an exodus, a flight of 
its learned proletariat, the gifted and needy but 



406 ON THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE. 

often unprincipled and immoral scholars of the 
Christian Orient. From the Golden Horn and 
the Greek cities of Asia Minor they came in 
great numbers to Italy. Every city of the 
peninsula welcomed them, every little court 
invited them. Only Florence, the City of the 
Golden Lilies, was especially generous. Here a 
great family of merchant-princes and bankers, 
the Medici, had long been absorbing, by a com- 
plicated system of accounts, the political author- 
ity, long been debasing the democratic spirit of 
the once rude and proud commonwealth by the 
Arno. Cosimo de' Medici, and his grandson 
Lorenzo the Magnificent, are among the ex- 
traordinary men of history — self-willed, working 
now by cunning, now by violence, gifted with a 
clear untroubled vision of their aims and the 
practical means to attain them, rich beyond past 
example, judiciously prodigal, cautious and cer- 
tain in their deliberate enslavement of the Flor- 
entine. In and through the Medici, themselves 
enriched democrats, the democracies of Northern 
Italy finally fell a prey to the new monarchies 
that it took a Napoleon to overthrow. But if 
they were enemies of the popular liberties, the 
Medici were the patrons of letters and arts. 
Their money flowed like water for manuscripts 



ON THE ITALIAN BEN AISSANCE. 407 

of the Greek and Latin classics, for museums 
and galleries where all the curiosities of antiq- 
uity were gathered, for collections of coins and 
medals, for every bit of skilled handiwork — 
engravings, bronzes, marbles, ivories, miniatures, 
intaglios, jewels — for all that was rich, rare, 
and beautiful. Under their protection the learn- 
ing and poetry of Greece were made known 
again to Italy after an estrangement of twelve 
centuries. Aristotle was taught, but not the 
barbarous Aristotle of the schools ■ — he was now 
read in the original texts. Above all, Plato was 
set up as the true master of the mind, the one 
man who held the secrets of existence both here 
and hereafter. His " magisterium " was unques- 
tioned, his mellifluous sentences were held the 
very breathing of divinity. His highly spiritual 
philosophy drove out from the schools the exact 
and severe logic of the Stagirite. At the same 
tiiHe its vague and uncertain idealism ate in like a 
cancer upon the stern moral conceptions of life, 
duty, sin, judgment, that were essential to Chris- 
tianity. For severity of principles there were set 
up serenity, placidity of soul, equableness and 
moderation of views, a large and calm tolerance 
of all opinions, based on the assumption that 
there was nothing in the realm of thought but 



408 ON THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE. 

opinions, and tliat the correct thing was to have 
only such as were lovely and beautiful. 

The doctrines of Plato are, in a way, reconcila- 
ble with Christianity, which can always find some 
truth, some utility in every human philosophy. 
This reconciliation was once executed by the 
Christian Fathers — SS. Gregory of Nazianzum 
and Gregory of Nyssa, St. Basil the Great, 
St. John Chrysostom, and others, men of sin- 
cere and enlightened faith. It could not be 
repeated by the Byzantine Greeks of the Renais- 
sance, who were only too often infidels at heart, 
scandalized by the success of Mohammed, and 
still oftener libertines in conduct and principle. 
Nevertheless, a holy and learned cardinal like 
Bessarion, a mystic gentle priest like Marsilio 
Ficino, and a multitude of similar men, did 
believe that the divine Plato was as another 
Messias, and that his refined and superior natu- 
ralism could somehow be the bridge over which 
the modern world would, go into the fold of 
Jesus Christ. It was an excusable error, but a 
profound error, and its influence on all after civ- 
ilization of Europe has been incalculable. 

All these new influences were intimately re- 
lated to the primum mobile of Italian life — the 
fine arts. Architecture, painting, sculpture, and 



ON THE ITALIAN BENAISSANCE. 409 

music were true educators at all times of the 
Italian soul, very susceptible and plastic, par- 
ticularly open to external influences. In this 
the Italians differed little from other peoples 
who live beneath a cloudless sky, in a land of 
perpetual sunshine, amid the charms of a boun- 
teous and smiling natm^e. 

Italy had never heartily adopted the Gothic 
architecture. The soft and even climate called 
for broad, open, and lightsome spaces, while the 
clear and cultivated genius of the people was 
opposed to the dim uncertain lines and the semi- 
darkness of the Northern Gothic. They adopted, 
indeed, such details as were compatible with 
florid ornamentation — the pointed arch, the 
window of colored glass. But the so-called 
Gothic churches of Italy are always more Ro- 
manesque than Gothic, seldom if ever the nicely 
poised and balanced framework that rises like 
a perfect problem in calculus. Even these small 
concessions to the mediaeval spirit were soon 
withdrawn. The architecture of the Italian 
Renaissance becomes frankly pagan. The un- 
finished churches of their Middle Ages, and they 
were many, are often completed after the style 
of a pagan temple. Everywhere there is abso- 
lute symmetry of level lines, cold, unrelieved 



410 ON THE ITALIAN BENAISSANCK 

plain surfaces, perfect proportions of columns 
and stories — a bookish architecture with little 
or no free-ranging personality. Who are now 
the builders? It is no longer the strong spir- 
itual bishop rousing his people to raise before 
the world a fitting temple for the God of all 
natural beauty. It is the merchant who builds 
a small but perfect palace within a reasonable 
time, the despot who enlarges his modest shop 
and converts a square or two into a fortified but 
elegant camp, the brigand who calls on the 
scholar to make his stony crags impregnable, 
the epicure who retires from a jarring and rude- 
mannered world to enjoy a life of natural com- 
fort in an elegant villa amid flowers and birds 
and sunshine, in the company of cultured men 
and women. Italian humanity, in its upper 
classes, is disenchanted of the great mediasval 
spell of vigorous, expanding, proselytizing Cathol- 
icism, and the new temper is shown at once in 
the new architecture that is of the earth earthy. 
It is not a little striking that the noble treatise 
of the Roman Vitruvius on architecture should 
have been discovered and edited by Poggio, one 
of the most immoral men of the Renaissance. 
This new architecture lends itself everywhere to 
richness and elegance, in the deco]::ation of doors 



ON THE ITALIAN BENAISSANCE. 411 

and windows, in the objects of furnitiire. 
Everywhere the ornaments of antiquity return 
to use — the egg and dart, the scroll, the trail- 
ing vine, the scenes of the harvest. The 
churches, are vast galleries of pretty and tempt- 
ing art- works, repetitions of the salons of the' 
nobles. The bell-towers of the Middle Ages, 
picturesque and rugged, disappear; the exterior 
walls of the churches are white or yellow-washed. 
Most of the traces of the mediaeval life and 
spirit vanish — as a rule, of course, unconsciously. 
Jt was a new spirit, a new atmosphere, that was 
abroad. Architecture became a thing of the 
schools, a science of rules and precepts as solemn 
as the laws of the Medes and Persians. This 
was largely the work of the Latin and Greek 
scholars, the men known as Humanists, from 
the word Humanitas or Humaniores litterce, mean- 
ing civilization, refined literature, and the like. 
It was an unfortunate thing that deep in the 
hearts of many of these men there reigned a 
positive antipathy to the ideals and tenets of 
Christianity — hence all its peculiar monuments 
must be decried. New ideas must have a new 
setting, or rather, the old ideas must be clothed 
again in the old forms. 
We must not believe that all this love of 



412 ON THE ITALIAN BENAISSANCE. 

classical learning, this devotion to the fine arts, 
was a sudden growth. The splendid works of 
the fifteenth century in painting and sculpture 
were no more a sudden blossoming than the 
architecture of the period. Since the time of 
Giotto and the Pisani, the observation of nature 
and the perfection of technical skill in drawing, 
coloring, draping, landscape, decorative orna- 
ment, had been growing. There were regular 
schools for all the arts, notably the workshops 
of such wonderful Italian cathedrals as Pisa and 
Orvieto and Florence that were never quite 
finished — so vast were the ideas of their build- 
ers. We know now that the Italian painters 
had been learning much from the artists of 
Flanders and Burgundy — the handling of light 
and shade, the art of painting in oils — a revolu- 
tion that threw out of daily or domestic use the 
fresco and the painting on wood, and made 
popular the canvas painting. Engraving on 
wood and copper multiplied the best work and 
enriched the artist. The painter is now as in- 
tensely popular as once the singer of love and 
war. He is yet a plain man of the people and 
bears always a popular name, often a nickname. 
No matter what his subjects are, he introduces 
the local landscape, let us say. of Tuscany or 



ON THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE, 413 

Umbria, the local personages and customs. In 
the human figure the old conveintionalism disap- 
pears and the portrait takes its place — in a 
word, we have a Christian realism in painting. 
At Sienna there lives on a remnant of the deeply 
pious old school, the school of calm and serene 
adoration and contemplation that has left us the 
sweet evangel of San Gemignano. But through- 
out Tuscany, beginning with Florence, it is dif- 
ferent. Living portraits, domestic landscapes, 
local traits of daily life, real houses and castles, 
unique and lovely ornaments based on flowers 
of the field and the lines of nature herself — the 
individual experiences of the painter — are in 
every picture. The prophets lose their nimbus 
or halo, the apostles are figures of men on the 
street, the women are the mothers, sisters, sweet- 
hearts, of the painters. Some few traces of that 
stem law of early Christian painting that fixed 
every type and made it obligatory live on. 
Thus, the "Last Supper," the "Madonna and 
Child," for the composition and disposition of fig- 
ures, are the same as you may see in the Cata- 
combs at Rome. But Lionardo da Vinci is said 
to have walked the streets of Milan for ten years 
looking for a suitable head of Christ to put in 
his great masterpiece. The living model came 



414 02T THE ITALIAN BENAISSANCE, 

into use — it would have been an abomination 
to the severely moral and mystic soul of the 
mediaeval painter. Painting was, indeed, yet in 
the service of the Church. But it was seeking 
new objects, ancient history and pagan mythol- 
ogy. Here came in the influence of the book- 
men, the Greek and Latin scholars. Through 
them the painting, or rather the sculpture and 
architecture of antiquity, revived and were culti- 
vated. They lectured on the beauty of them, 
praised every new find, wrote daily on the abso- 
lute inimitable perfection of what the Greeks and 
Komans did, said, and were. Consciously or un- 
consciously these teachers, whether in university 
hall or city market-place, or in the palaces of 
the nobles, perverted the simple genuine Christian 
life of many an Italian town. The thousand 
years of the Middle Ages became a long dismal 
blank — - its monuments, like its writings, were to 
their mind without true style, without perfection 
of form, therefore bad and worthy of eternal 
oblivion. 

Of course, the local domestic origin of much 
Italian painting kept up always the rehgious 
life. A multitude of the noblest works of the 
great masters of the fifteenth, and even the 
sixteenth, century was produced for village 



ON THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE, 415 

confraternities — banners, altar-pieces ; another 
multitude was made for individuals. Every 
lady wanted a Madonna in' her little oratory, 
and it must be by the best painter of the time. 
The workshop of a Perugino or a Raphael was 
crowded with orders from all Italy. Raphael is 
said to have painted with his own hand, or de- 
signed and begun, nearly three hundred Madonnas. 
Every family of importance had an altar in the 
parish church or in some church of the monks or 
friars, and it had to be decorated by the finest 
talent they could secure. Then there were the 
"Laudi," the village processions, and the 
*^ Mysteries " — the real origin of our theatres. 
All their forms of outdoor life called for im- 
ages, painted compositions, and the most famous 
painter did not disdain the gold pieces that he 
got from humble village-folk for these designs. 
The intense rivalry of popular Italian life com- 
pelled him to produce something new and lovely 
each time, and in this way furthered constantly 
the perfection of such work. 

Thus, the natural genius, the climate, the 
history, the monuments of antiquity, the lan- 
guage of the Italians, and their unbroken resi- 
dence on the soil since the remotest times — 
all conspired to create an incredible number 



416 OJV THE ITALIAN BENAI8SANCB, 

of the loveliest works of art, and to make 
Italy one great gallery of the fine arts. 

In the fifteenth century were finished, to a 
great extent, the buildings begun in the thir- 
teenth. Milan, Orvieto, Sienna, Pisa, gave the 
new classical temper a chance to overshadow 
the spirit of the Middle Ages in fagades, win- 
dows, decoration, and sculpture that consciously 
depart from the spiritual beliefs and ideals of 
the men who planned and partly executed these 
great works. The new skill in drawing, both 
outline and perspective, and in foreshortening, 
permitted a more grandiose kind of frescoing. 
And when the scholars of Squarcione at Padua, 
like Andrea Mantegna, were given such a work 
as the T palace of Mantua to build, they repro- 
duced antiquity along every line as far as they 
were able. They did not have it all their own 
way — a Fra Angelico and a Fra Bartolonmieo, 
and many another famous painter, still clung to 
the inward and ideal spiritual beauty, the ex- 
pression in each face of tender sentiments of 
piety, divine adoration, love, humility, gratitude. 
After the great triumphs of the fifteenth century 
the genuinely Christian sculpture grew rarer, 
driven out of business by the glorious models 
of antique art that were being daily dug up. 



OJV THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE, 417 

and by the popular admiration for these models 
that sinned in many ways against the delicacy 
of the Christian conscience. When finally the 
old St. Peter's was thrown down and the vast 
modern basilica was planned and begun, the 
genuine Christian architecture, and with it of 
course the other arts, suffered a humiliation 
from which they are only beginning to recover. 
A curious feature of the Italian Renaissance 
is the fact that many of its painters, sculptors, 
and architects were goldsmiths or apprentices 
of goldsmiths. The Italian goldsmith of the 
time was in reality, very often, the chief man 
of science in the town. We must remember 
that there was as yet no sharp distinction in 
artistic work — the true artist was able to turn 
his hand to sculpture as well as painting, to 
engraving on copper as well as to writing down 
the principles and practice of all these arts. 
Thus the goldsmith must know many secrets 
of chemistry and the treatment of the precious 
metals, he had to be an architect for designing 
of reliquaries and an engraver for the inscriptions 
and fine ornamentation, a worker in mosaic and 
therefore a painter 5 a good ironsmith too, for 
he often had orders of a bulky nature. His 
shop, like the traditional shoemaker's shop, was 



418 ON THE ITALIAN BENAISSANCE, 

the rendezvous of the chief citizens; his lovely 
masterpieces were on their tables and in their 
halls. 

So a Verrocchio, a Pollajnolo, a Ghirlandajo, 
a Francia, were either apprentices of goldsmiths 
or goldsmiths themselves. It is also of some in- 
terest to know that most of the great artists of 
the fifteenth centm-y were of poor and humble ori- 
gin. It is a significant commentary on the truism 
that the real goods of life are not moneys, lands, 
revenues, but the fruits of the mind and the 
heart — education and religion. Who knows 
or who cares, except some dustman or scavenger 
of history, about the rich bankers of Augsburg, 
the wool merchants of Florence, the public car- 
riers of Venice ? With their wealth they wrote 
a line upon the sands of time that the next 
wave obliterated. But the names of the great 
artists shine forever in their masterpieces and 
echo forever above the great procession of hu- 
manity. Their very names to-day are a golden 
mine for Italy, since from every quarter of the 
world they draw thither an increasing multitude 
of men and women. Giotto was a shepherd, and, 
like him, Andrea Mantegna tended sheep. Fra 
Bartolommeo was the son of a carter. Lionardo 
da Vinci, Brunelleschi, and Michael Angelo were 



ON THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE. 419 

the sons of humble officials. They were all, or 
nearly all, poorly enough paid, and much less 
esteemed than the pompous Latinists and Gre- 
cists who got all that was going in the shape 
of fat offices, ambassadorships, public junketings, 
and the like. Society usually gets what it pays 
for — in those days it admired too much the fine 
forms of antiquity, that were as empty then 
as now of any deep moral value, and it got in 
return fine words and elegant rhetoric. But 
these were very hollow things and failed to 
preserve the popular liberties of the Italian 
republics that were as solid as a rock so long as 
the people held to their mediaeval ideals. While 
the people of Florence, for example, went off 
in pursuit of mere earthly beauty, in language 
and color and form, the chains of a long slavery 
were being forged against their awakening. 
With his banquets and his songs, his wit and 
his lasciviousness, his manuscripts and his 
jewels, Lorenzo led the people out of their medi- 
aeval roughness and rawness. But when these 
nodes ccenceque deum were over came the dawn 
of a cruel and debasing slavery. 

After all, Florence is the t3^ical city of the 
Italian Renaissance. It is true that many of 
her greatest artists worked for the popes at 



420 ON THE ITALIAN BENAISSANCE, 

Eome, and that St. Peter's and the Vatican 
are only too thoroughly Renaissance work. It 
is true that a multitude of Roman churches owe 
their erection or their present form and orna- 
ment to this period. It is also true that govern- 
ment and administration were highly colored in 
that city by the ideals and the temper of the 
Renaissance. But, when all is said, it remains 
true that the city of Rome is primarily a mediae- 
val city, and only in a secondary way a city of 
the Renaissance. Its art is at Rome an impor- 
tation, the citizens do not give their children to 
it, it has nowhere a common popular character. 
There is no wild surging of the masses to look 
at the last masterpiece of Donatello, no submis- 
sion of superb plans and designs to the taste of 
the mob. Thus, while the Eternal City wears 
the livery of the Renaissance, it is nowise true 
that it was the foyer, the living centre of its 
influence. That was always Florence. There the 
slowly rising cathedral, the baptistery, the bronze 
doors of Ghiberti, the private fortress-palaces 
of the Pitti, the Strozzi, the Rucellai, the statues 
of San Giorgio, the masterpieces of the Loggia, 
the Greek philosophers and infidels, the Latin 
orators and critics, the gabby farceurs, the della 
Robbia, a Filippo Lippi, a Benozzo Gozzoli, a 



ON TBE ITALIAN BENAISSANCE. 421 

Domenico Ghirlandajo; are all contemporary, 
all at home beneath a sky and amid a nature 
that seemingly are made for them. For us 
moderns they have been made to live again by 
John Addington Symonds, by Perrens, Yillari, 
Monnier, and by the incomparable " vision " of 
George Eliot. Rome, Naples, Milan, Venice, 
and countless minor cities, have each their im- 
mortal works, their glorious names, that enthuse 
from generation to generation all lovers of the 
beautiful. Each of these cities has its own signifi- 
cance in the history of the human mind in the 
West. Each was in its way a schoolroom of our 
education. But Florence is the great university 
of the Eenaissance, where its materials are piled 
up, where its professors were trained, where its 
lessons were long and regularly taught, where 
its philosophy worked out most easily all its 
purposes and problems. Here, above all, its spirit 
was always at home, a supreme and masterful 
spirit of free affectionate surrender to the claims 
of beauty, regardless of truth and morality, as 
though beauty were to itself a higher law and 
its service some unshackled esoteric form of 
religion, sole worthy of the chosen spirits 
to whom are revealed its infinite grace, pro- 
portion, and harmony. Here, long before 



422 ON THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE, 

Luther and Calvin, was reached the real 
parting of the ways, the Pythagorean letter 
of crucial import, the conscious divorce of the 
senses and the soul with a rigid resolution to 
walk in the chosen path whithersoever it finally 
led. 

Already the soul of Christian Italy was called 
on to accept the noted formula : Amicus quidem 
Plato, sed magis arnica Veritas, It is a long cry 
frbm Pius II. (^neas Sylvius) to St. Pius Y., 
but in that fateful century there went on such 
a fierce and relentless probing of hearts and 
consciences throughout the peninsula as had 
never been seen since the days of Augustus. 
Unexpectedly men came upon the scene who 
hewed judgment to the line and hung the plum- 
met of righteousness. And when their work 
was done the astonished world confessed that 
there was yet a heart of oak in the old mediaB- 
val burg o£ Catholicism, that it could rise, stern 
and uncompromising, from an hour of dalliance 
and indolence, that it was not unworthy of its 
immemorial right of leadership, that it was able 
to cope as successfully with the insidious revival 
of the paganism of Libanius and Symmachus as 
it had with the paganism of Frederick II., that 
it knew itself always for the living responsible 



OJV THE ITALIAN BENAISSANCE, 423 

conscience of Catholicism which, had never yet 
implored from it in vain the key-note of harmony 
or the bugle-call of resistance imto death, and 
that with native directness it saw far and clearly 
into the nature and course of the incredible rev- 
olution that was sweeping away all Northern 
Europe. 



ALPHABETICAL INDEX. 



Agapetus, teacher of Justinian, 

108, 112 
Agilulf, 23 
Alaric, 67 

Albertus Magnus, 242 
Alcuin, 233 
Alfred the Great, 228 
Amiel, 252 

Anastasius, Emperor, 41, 42 
Anglo-Saxons, barbarian, char- 
acter of, 27, 43 

Christianized, 28 

and Holy See, 29, 32 
Apostolic Constitutions, 287 
Aquitania, Bernard of, 243 
Arabs, fairs of, 114 

literature, 115 

pastoral life, 115 

homogeneity, 115 

their paganism, 116 

ascetics among, 120 

Spanish, civilization of, 200 
Architecture, Italian, growth 

of, 416 
Arianism, origin of, 49 

Lombard, 23 
Arnulf, of Cambrai, 239, 367 

of Metz, 246 
Arts, origin of mediaeval fine, 
236 

domestic, 236 

power of, in Italy, 418 

Seven Liberal, 234 
Assemani, 229 
Astronomy, 234 
Asylum, right of, 193 
Ataulf, 188 
Athens, schools, decay of, 36 



Authority, Catholic idea of, 
169, 171 
papal, 16 
Avars, empire of, 57, 63 

Barbarians, Romanized, laws 

of, 101 
Barbarism, age of, 9, 37, 43, 
54, 56, 58, 67, 136, 139, 
374 
Bartolommeo, Fra, 418 
Basilicas, Christian, 317, 318, 

319 
Bathing, in primitive Christian 
times, 286, 287, 288 
in Middle Ages, 290, 292 
frequency of, 291 
Baths, Roman, closing of, 289 
ecclesiastical Roman, 294 
mediaeval, 290 
casuistry of, 291, 295 
in France, Germany, Eng- 
land, 295 
Bede, St., 233 
Belisarius, 53, 61, 64 
Bernward, of Hildesheim, 236 
Bishop, mediaeval, and woman, 
174 
the mediaeval, 155 
social office of, 156, 159 
moral authority of, 170 
Bishops, Catholic, save law and 
order, 14, 140, 145, 147, 149, 
154, 163, 189, 198, 194, 195, 
197 
Boethius, 232 
Brebeuf , 27 
Brewer, James, 298 



425 



426 



ALPHABETICAL INDEX. 



Britain, and Empire, 55 
BruneUeschi, 239, 418 

Csesaro-papism, 50, 107 
Canon Law, nature of, 167 
influence of, 167 
and civil order, 168 
Cassiodorus, 231, 240 
Cathedral, mediaeval, nature 
of, 324, 353 
workshop of fine arts, 325, 

353 
practical school of building 

arts,327 
administration of, 328 
decoration of, 331 
furniture of, 332, 334 
a city of the dead, 333 
a popular enterprise, 336 
an interpreter of Catholicism, 

338 
an expression of real life, 

341 
how built, 343 
contributions of poor, 343 
and the guilds, 346 
the germ of city life, 329, 

330 
example of good administra- 
tion, 205 
Catholicism, a manifold plas- 
tic power, 219 
distinctive monuments of, 

312 
civilizing work of, 207 
and natural character, 208 
and public opinion, 210 
and natural languages, 211 
and mediaeval education, 

197, 198 
and the soil of Europe, 142 
and the laws of labor, 143 
and social reform, 144 
and peasantry of Europe, 153 
and youthful states, 160 
and mediaeval tyranny, 165 
and mediaeval marriage, 172 
and woman, 174 



the nursery of mediaeval 

life, 180 
mediaeval popular influence 
of, 307, 322 
Caucasus, Christians of, 62 
Chalcedon, Council of, 61, 88, 

109 
Chant, Gregorian, 34 
Character, national mediaeval, 

208 
Charlemagne, 55, 187, 295, 296, 

320, 359 
Charles the Bald, 244, 248 
Chaucer, 239 
Chosroes II., 61 
Christianity in India, origin of, 

222 
Churches, Catholic, compared 
with pagan temples, 314 
growth of Catholic types, 

315, 316 
number and beauty of an- 
cient, 317 
the books of the people, 308 
parish, uses of, 206 
mediaeval function of, 207 
Cities, Catholic origin of many, 

152, 153 
Civilization, nature of, 134 
Classics, Latin, devotion to, 

395, 419 
Clergy, Catholic, in mediaeval 
England, 298. 
and popular instruction, 299, 

306 
manuals of preaching, 301, 

304 
grossly slandered, 302 
Climate, influence on Greek 

character, 83 
Cloth, manufacture of, 156 
Cluny, influence of monastery, 

359 
Cochlaeus, John, 257 
Colchu, of Clonmacnois, 233 
Color, mediaeval passion for, 334 
Columbus, 217 
Common Life, Brothers of, 257 



ALPHABETICAL INDEX. 



427 



Constantinople, Greek charac- 
ter of, 46 

and Persia, 51, 62 

and Balkans, 58 

influence on Slav world, 59 

natural seat of empire, 69 

influence of climate, 84 

morality of mediseval, 79 

condition of woman in, 80 

society of, 80, 82 

the Hippodrome, 86 

Blue and Green factions, 86 

Church and State in, 107 

Nike sedition, 86. 

and Islam, 218 

also pp. 321, 361, 362, 365, 
366, 389 
Controversies, christological, 

last days of, 105 
Cosmos Indicopleustes, 221 
Crusades, character of, 355, 356, 
390 

and the papacy, 307 

enthusiasm for, 370 

beginnings of, 359 

conduct of, 362, 369 

motives of, 364 

first expansion of mediaeval 
Europe, 373, 375 

influence on European poli- 
tics, 376 

and human learning, 388, 390 

judgment of impartial Prot- 
estant writers, 392 

and navigation, 383 

domestic arts, 383 

further cause of human lib- 
erty, 384 

and vernacular literatures, 
385 

and middle classes, 387, 388 

dissensions of, 365 . 

share of Venice and Genoa, 
368 

of Italians, 386 

feudal states in Orient, 369 

improvement of warfare, 370, 
382, 383 



Culture, Christian, 13 
Catholic medisBval, 216 

Dante, 104, 215, 235, 239 
Daras, fortress of, 66, 71 
Dialectic, 234 
Diamper, Synod of, 225 
Dicuil, of Clonmacnois, 233 
Digest, The, 99 

Docility, a mediseval trait, 163 
Dodana, Duchess of Septima- 

nia, 243 
Duns Scotus, 239 

Edda, the, and Catholicism, 214 
Education, mediseval, 177, 178, 
197, 256, 257 
for laymen, 205 
ethical spirit of, 240 
aims at the heart, 241 
German, and the Reforma- 
tion, 258, 269 
causes of decay, 259, 262,267 
Luther on Catholic, 260 
sad fate of teachers, 263 
immorality of youth, 264, 283 
absence of discipline, 266 
Egypt, granary of Constanti- 
nople, 71 
Einhard, 243, 296 
Ekkehard, 243 
Eloi, St., 230 
Embroidery, 199 
Emperor, Byzantine, characteJt 
and office, 50, 85 
theory of mediseval, 374, 375 
Empire, Byzantine, greatness 
of, 42 
Roman, collapse of, 10, 139, 
150 
Engelbert, of Cologne, 330 
England, before the Reforma- 
tion, 297 
Ennodius, of Pavia, 240 
Era, Christian, introduction of, 

35 
Erasmus, CoUoquia of, 265 
Eucharist, the Holy, 201 



428 



ALPHABETICAL INDEX, 



Fagging, in German universi- 
ties, 284 

Fairs, mediaeval, 156 

Florence, home of the Renais- 
sance, 406, 419 

France, consolidated by church- 
men, 179 

Frank, Empire, origin of, 55 

Franks, character of, 24 

Freeman, Edward, 381 

Gasquet, Dom, 298, 304, 306 
Gellone, WiUiam of, 243 
Genoa, and the Crusades, 368 
George Eliot, 421 
German language, and Catholi- 
cism, 211 

neglected for Latin, 265 
Germany, culture of mediaeval, 

256 
Gibbon, Edward, character as 

historian, 77 
Giotto, 347, 418 
Good works, doctrine of, 178 
Gothic, origin of style, 322 

principles of, 323 

first home is the North of 
France, 324 
Grosseteste, of Lincoln, 330 
Grotius, Hugo, 162 
Greece, desolation of, 67 

mediaeval history of, 37 
Greek churches, sources of his- 
tory, 106 
Greeks, mediaeval, and the Cru- 
sades, 366, 367 
Gregory the Great, family of, 
17 

early education, 18 

benefactor of humanity, 19 

and barbarian world, 20, 26 

and Lombards, 23 

and barbarian kings, 25 

and Anglo-Saxons, 27 

accused of ignorantism, 34 

his writings, 30, 33 

his memory, 33 

and farmers of Sicily, 146 



Gregory VII, 359, 560 
Guelf and Ghibelline, 351 
Guilds, the mediaeval, 346, 352 

Hagar, and Ishmael, 114 
Handwriting, 199 
Hanif s, Arabian monks, 120 
Heathen customs, 34 
Hegira, era of the, 121 
Hegius Alexander, 257 
Hellenism, world-career, 47 

nature of, 48 

and heresy, 48 

and the Orient, 51 

decay of, 36 
Henry IV., Emperor, 360 
Henry VHL, 298 
Hergenrother, Cardinal, 108 
Huns, Empire of, 57 

Ideas, fundamental mediaeval, 

309 
Illyrian emperors, 41 
Institutions, Roman, decay of, 
11, 35, 36, 37, 127 
representative, 180, 195 
educational, continuity of, 
231 
International Law, 160 
Isauria, rebellions of, 65 
Islam, its dogma, 113 
the five points of, 116 
notion of God, 117 
of sin and morality, 117 
fatalism of, 117 
influence of, 118, 128 
spread by the sword, 126 
reasons of success, 127 
mediaeval culture of, 128 
and the Crusades, 130 
and the popes, 132, 133 
Italy, mediaeval, schools of, 232, 
242 
preserves the building arts, 

321 
five states of in Renais- 
sance, 396 
wars of, 396 



ALPHABETICAL INDEX, 



429 



despots of, 397 
and Latin classics, 401 
monuments and reminiscen- 
ces of former greatness, 402 
and Roman Law, 403 
superior education of lay- 
men in, 404 
and Greek scholarship, 404, 

406, 407 
and the Medici, 406 
and the fine arts, 409 
and pagan architecture, 409 

Janssen, John, History of Ger- 
man people, 258, 298, 305 
Jesuits, and education in Ger- 
many, 269 

and the neo-classic drama, 
274, 275 
Jesus Christ, spirit of, 37 

mediaeval devotion to, 358 
John of Cappadocia, 88 
Judith, Empress, 24 
Jurisconsults, Roman, 97 
Justinian, place in history, 38 

sources of history, 39 

nationality of, 40 

policy of, 52 

wars of, 53, 65 

cares of, 63, 68 

his generals, 64, 65 

fortifications of, 67 

diplomacy of, 71 

decay of his army, 73 

builds many churches, 75 

humane legislation of, 75, 76 

fiscal oppression of, 87 

passion for architecture, 90 

generosity of, 91 

his law schools, 92 

and laws of Rome, 93, 97 

Christian spirit of, 103 

and Dante, 103 

a theologian, 92, 108, 110, 
112 

and Ravenna, 111 

and Roman Church, 91, 108 
Justiniana Prima, 59 



Kaaba, the, 114 

Kadidja, wife of Mohammed, 

118, 119 
Knights, Hospitaller of St. 

John, 371, 372 
Koran, the, 121, 122 
character of, 124 
bondage of, 132 

Lallemant, 27 

Language, mediaeval devo- 
tional, 303 

national, affected by Catholi- 
cism, 213 
Law of Citations, 98 

International, origin of, 160 

Roman, growth of, 94 

spirit of, 95 

codification of, 96 

mediaeval, 99, 101 

influence of, 101 
Legates, papal, 161 
Leo the Great, 16 
Leo X., 394 
Leo Xin., 162 
Liber Manualis, of Dodana, 242 

date of, 244 

a journal intime, 245, 253 

content of, 246 

piety of, 250 
Leonardo da Vinci, 418 
Literature, Italian, fondness 
for, 402, 419 

European, vernacular growth 
of, 385 
Liturgy, Catholic, a civilizing 
factor, 209 

mediaeval influence of, 250 
Liudprand of Cremona, 361 
Lombards, character of, 23, 54, 

56 
Louis, the Pious, 244 

St., 310 
Loyalty, mediaeval idea of, 
357, 358 

Maestri Comacini, 319 
Maitland, Dr. Samuel, 298 



430 



ALPHABETICAL INDEX, 



Malabar, Christians of, 222, 
223 
their wooden churches, 224 
their rites and customs, 225 
church discipline, 227 
writers on, 229 

Mantegna, Andrea, 418 

Manuals, of mediseval preach- 
ing, 304 
of prayers in vernacular, 
304 

Manuscripts, illuminated, 197 

Marco Polo, 217, 224 

Marcus Aurelius, 37, 48, 56 

Marriage, history of mediseval, 
172 
impediments of, 173 

Mary, Blessed Virgin, 201 

Maurice de Sully, 330 

Mecca, holy city of Arabs, 114, 

120, 123, 217 

Medici, and Florence, 406, 419 

Medism, 36, 52 

Melanchthon, and German edu- 
cation, 264 

Michael Angelo, 394, 418 

Michelet, 293 

Middle Ages, character of, 
137 

Missionaries, Franciscan, 217 

Mohammed, birth of, 114 
youth of, 118 
religious emotions of, 119 
sources of his teaching, 120, 

121, 122 

first converts, 120 

at Medina, 123 

and Eoman Empire, 361 
Monasteries, influences of, 206 
Money, mediaeval idea of, 175 
Monks, Benedictine, 150 

civilizers of Europe, 151 

medical service, 157 
Monnier, 421 

Monophysites, 85, 106, 109 
Montalembert, 381 

Nibelungen Lied, 235 



Oaths, sanctity of, 181 

Office, public, mediaeval con- 
cept of, 185, 188 

Opinion, public, mediaeval ori- 
gin of, 210 

Otto, of Freising, 239 

Painting, development of Ital- 
ian, 412, 415 
humble origin of greatest 

masters, 418 
mediaeval fresco, 334 
Pandects, 99 
Papal letters in Middle Ages, 

164 
Peasants' War, 299 
Peramal, Malabar dynasty, 228 
Persia, and Roman Empire, 51, 
59, 160 
subsidized by Constantino- 
ple, 61, 63 
engineers of, 61 
Personality, mediaeval sense of, 

182 
Photius, 108, 361 
Pirkheimer, Clara and Chari- 

tias, 257 
Pius IL, 218 

Poor, the mediaeval, 157, 178 
Popes, and Roman Empire, 15, 
20, 21, 31, 45 
and Constantinople, 45 
and Islam, 132, 133, 218 
and the Crusades, 366, 367 
and Western schism, 395 
peacemakers of Europe, 161 
Portuguese and Malabar Chris- 
tians, 224, 226, 228 
Prayer for the dead, 252 
Priesthood, Catholic, mediaeval 

respect for, 249 
Procedure, Roman, 191 
Procopius, historian, 89, 53, 55 

secret anecdotes of, 77 
Puffendorf, 162 

Raphael, 394 
Ravenna, 54 



ALPHABETICAL INDEX, 



431 



Raymund Lullus, 242 

Real presence, conditions forms 

of churches, 315 
Reform, Christian power of, 

200 
Reformation, eve of, 298 
Renaissance, meaning of, 394 
reihote causes of, 395 
temper of, 400 
and Plato, 408 
and the goldsmiths, 417 
antipathy to Christianity, 

407, 411, 414, 416 
and Rome, 420, 422 
close relation of, to the Mid- 
dle Ages, 412 
Renan, 293 
Responsibility, mediaeval sense 

of, 182 
Rhetoric, mediaeval, 234 
Riches, mediaeval idea of right 

uses, 176 
Roger Bacon, 242 
Roland, Chanson de, 235 
Roman law, 190, 374, 403 

and the Church, 169, 190, 195 
Roman and Greek character 

compared, 405 
Romance languages and Ca- 
tholicism, 214 
Romanesque, style, origin of, 

318, 319, 320 
Rome, and Anglo-Saxons, 29, 
32. 



Sagas, and Catholicism, 214 
St. Bede, 233 
St. Francis of Assisi, 310 
St. Louis of France, 239, 310 
St. Wandrille, of Fontenelle, 

246 
Saints, true representatives of 
Middle Ages, 183 

royal, 187 
Sancta Sophia, building of, 90 
Schools, mediaeval, 198 

sciences and arts in, 199 



beginnings of, 233 
curriculum, 234 
Jesuit, in Germany, 270, 273 
Scriptures, function of in Mid- 
dle Ages, 210 
Senate, Roman, end of, 35 
Shakespeare, 169, 381 
Sheiks, Saracen, 60 
<' Shepherd's Book," the, 30, 

33 
Slanders, on the Middle Ages, 

286 
Slavery, mediaeval decay of, 

175 
Slavs, character of barbarian, 

57 
Suger, 239 
Suriani, Malabar Christians, 

223 
Swithelm of Sherburne, 223 
Symbolism, Christian, 203 
Symonds, John Addington, 421 
Synods, mediaeval, social uses 

of, 180, 195 
Syria, and Malabar Christians, 

222 

Teachers, mediaeval, 230 

science of, 234 

religious character of, 238 
Templar, Knights, 371 
Terror, General, a fable, 321 
Teutonic Knights, 372 
Theodelinda, 23 
Theodora, Empress, 78, 84 
Theodoric, 41 
Thomas, St., preaches in India, 

221 
Tribonian, 98 

Universities, mediaeval origin 

of, 204, 242 
German, in fifteenth century, 

256 
Catholic German, decay of, 

278 
causes of, 279, 280 
Protestant German, 281 



432 



ALPHABETICAL INDEX, 



Usury, 176 

Venice and the Crusades, S 
Vergil, in Middle Ages, 235 
Vigilius, Pope, 109 
Villari, Pasquale, 421 
Viniculture, 156 



Welfare, 
179 



sense of common. 



Western mind and spirit, 217 
Wimpheling, 257, 264, 273 
Windows, mediaeval painted, 

335 
original purpose of, 336 
Winifred, St., Holy WeU of, 

296 
Woman, mediaeval training of, 

258 

Zemzem, sacred well of, 114 



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Professor of Church History in the Catholic University, Washington. 

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but a set of sketches . . . especially noteworthy for the vast amount of 
information they contain and the extremely attractive way in which 
the pictures are elaborated. Opening the book at random we find an 
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ancient Carthage, which the present ruins of the great city are made, 
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"Dr. Shahan has many gifts . . . but none more attractive than 
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or rather infusing them, vivifying them, is a delightful spirit of sympathy. 
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power of genuine scholarliness, or of the graces and beauties of literary 
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writings of the Greeks, Latins, and Italians are as familiar to Dr. Shahan 
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The Beginnings of Christianity 

By Rev. THOMAS J. SHAHAN, S.T.D., J.U.L. 
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PRESS NOTICES.—Continued. 



"These subjects are all interesting and instructive, but their treat- 
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the University occupy his time very fully and that his literary work 
is done in odd moments, but we trust that he will be able to continue 
these delightful and valuable &tndies."— American Catholic Quarterly 
Review. 



"Dr. Shahan's book unmistakably evidences the sound and very 
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works published in Europe and in many languages. We are thankful to 
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